Author: Danica Coto
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Tens of thousands of customers were still without power across Puerto Rico on Tuesday, a week after Ernesto swept through the U.S. territory as a tropical storm. Authorities promised to restore power to everyone by the weekend.
The National Weather Service issued another overheat warning, warning of “dangerously hot and humid conditions.”
In the afternoon, more than 40,000 of nearly 1.5 million customers were still without power. All schools should have power by Tuesday night, officials said, noting that about 80% of emergency medical clinics, not including hospitals, had power.
The northeastern coastal town of Luquillo, popular with tourists, reported the highest number of outages, with 30% of customers without power. The towns of Fajardo, Rio Grande and Yabucoa were also affected.
Juan Saca, president of Luma Energy, the private consortium that oversees transmission and distribution in Puerto Rico, said the company was “working 24 hours a day” but that in addition to outages caused by the storm, there was a generation shortage.
As many as 70,000 customers could be temporarily stranded late Tuesday, while another 90,000 customers were already affected by manual outages on Puerto Rico's grid on Monday.
“It's very annoying and I don't want to minimize it,” Sarkar told reporters, stressing that the outages were short-lived.
Luma has been criticized since taking over transmission and distribution operations in June 2021 as the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority works to restructure more than $9 billion in debt.
Recently, a growing number of officials, including those seeking votes in an election year, have called on the government to cancel Luma's contract.
Governor Pedro Pierluisi supported Luma's work and his swift response after the Ernesto incident. “Within three days, 96 percent of the population has received electricity service,” he said on Monday.
During the storm that swept through the island last Tuesday and Wednesday, 750,000 customers were without power at its peak. Officials blamed downed trees on power lines and high winds.
Yet anger persists on the island of 3.2 million people, where poverty rates exceed 40 percent and few can afford generators or solar panels.
Jesús Hernández Arroyo, chairman of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives Energy Committee, said: “Due to the damage caused by the storm and the inefficiency of LUMA Energy in delivering precise and agile power, Puerto Rico is in urgent need of other, more reliable of energy.
The Puerto Rico Energy Authority questioned why the average outage time per customer increased 9% from fiscal year 2023 to fiscal 2024, to a total of 1,448 minutes.
Julio Aguilar, director of reliability and distribution automation at Luma, said at a news conference on Tuesday that weather and other factors can cause outages to rise and fall within a year, while it takes five years to build the foundation and metrics.
“Improvements are happening,” he said, “and people will see them.”
Puerto Rico's power grid remains fragile after being flattened by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm, in September 2017, but before that it was already crumbling from a lack of maintenance and investment.
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