A sweeping blackout hit Puerto Rico early Tuesday morning, halting power to nearly all of the island.
As of 9 a.m. Eastern, only 12 percent of Puerto Rico’s 1.4 million utility customers had power, according to the tracking page of Luma Energy, which supplies power to the U.S. territory. The company said it was activating emergency operations to restore power and described the blackout as “systemwide.”
Luma said on social media that “preliminary findings point to a fault on an underground line.” It said that it planned to restore power in phases and that “the entire process will take between 24-48 hours, conditions permitting.”
Josué Colón, the executive director of the Puerto Rico chamber of commerce, told Telemundo that he believed restoration would take several days.
The blackout appeared to be significantly bigger than an outage in June that left about 350,000 customers without power.
Puerto Rico has faced a series of blackouts since 2017, when Hurricane Maria severely damaged the island, including its power grid.
“We are demanding answers,” the territory’s governor, Pedro Pierluisi, said on social media. Power companies, he added, “must expedite the restart of the generating units outside the fault area and keep the people duly informed about the measures they are taking to restore service throughout the island.”
Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, the busiest in Puerto Rico, said in a statement on Tuesday that it was “operating normally thanks to electric generators.”
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