Power Outages Plague Puerto Rico Despite LUMA Takeover - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...-rico-electricity-protest.html
puerto rico new york times electricity crisis blackout
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our years after Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico’s electrical grid a shambles and the entire island in the dark, residents had expected their fragile power system to be stronger now. Instead, unreliable electricity remains frustratingly common, hindering economic development and daily life.
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Surging demand in August and September led to rolling blackouts affecting a majority of the island’s 1.5 million electrical customers.
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Last week, several thousand people marched along a main highway in San Juan, the capital, blocking traffic with the latest in a series of protests over the seemingly unending electricity problems plaguing the island.
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aging equipment, lack of maintenance and past mismanagement and corruption of an inefficient system.
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Many Puerto Ricans are diabetic and need refrigerated insulin to survive. The coronavirus pandemic has also put some people on respiratory therapies requiring electrical power at home for oxygen machines. Some Puerto Ricans are still studying or working at home.
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The system is so frail that a power plant recently went offline because sargassum — seaweed — blocked its filters.
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Crews patched Puerto Rico’s grid with $3.2 billion in emergency repairs after Hurricane Maria, which shredded the island’s power lines as a Category 4 storm in September 2017. Congress earmarked about $10 billion through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to rebuild the system. Those projects will be contracted out by the new consortium, with the aim of restoring the grid to how it was before the storm, with some modernization.
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LUMA took over in June, with its top officials saying they were prepared to handle a Category 2 hurricane. (None have hit the island this year.) Almost immediately, huge outages began.
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“The Puerto Rico electric system is arguably the worst in the United States and has been for a very long time, even prior to the devastating hurricanes in 2017,” Mr. Stensby said.