More than 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s more than 1.4 million utility customers were still without power Thursday afternoon, a day after a blackout knocked all of the island’s functioning power plants offline and left the entire nation in the dark.
Service was unlikely to be fully restored before the early hours on Friday, Josué Colón, Puerto Rico’s energy czar, told reporters. It would take that long, he said, to get all of the island’s functional power plants back online after the systemwide shutdown.
“We should have much of the population with electricity today,” Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón said Thursday afternoon. She said that one power plant had suffered serious damage, but that even so, service should be fully restored by Friday.
As of 2 p.m. Thursday, about 844,000 customers — about 57.5 percent of the total — had electricity, according to Luma Energy, the private contractor that operates the island’s power transmission system. A customer of the utility could be a house, an apartment building, a business, a government building or some other facility.
Among the critical institutions that were back online Thursday were a number of hospitals and the island’s airports, including the airport in San Juan, the capital.
The blackout occurred as a result of a series of failures in the power transmission system, Luma said, but the cause of those failures had not yet been established. The company has asked for three days to identify the likely cause.
The company said a preliminary review indicated that something had gone wrong with a protective system intended to keep a breakdown on a single line from shutting down the entire power grid, and that a transmission line in western Puerto Rico might have been affected by overgrowth.
Ms. González-Colón, who was elected last year after campaigning on a promise to cancel Luma’s contract, said the utility was required to patrol its lines by helicopter to spot overgrowth and prevent it from causing disruptions. Luma said it had been complying with that requirement but did not say when that particular transmission line had last been checked.
The governor also questioned whether the system was able to handle the higher demand for power during any holidays, noting that the blackout on Wednesday had occurred during Holy Week, when many Puerto Ricans are on vacation, and that a similar blackout had occurred on New Year’s Eve. The island loses an estimated $230 million a day when the power is out, she said.
“This is a shame for the people of Puerto Rico, that we have a problem of this magnitude,” Ms. González-Colón said on Wednesday, after cutting short a vacation and returning to the island.
Puerto Rico’s outdated and inefficient power system has suffered from years of mismanagement, lack of investment and poor maintenance. Its weaknesses became evident when Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, leaving many residents without power for months afterward.
Nearly eight years later, the island still faces a looming power generation shortage. Officials warned last month that the supply would probably not be sufficient to meet peak demand over the summer. The government has solicited bids for an additional operator or operators to provide more power on the island.
In Puerto Nuevo, a residential subdivision in San Juan, Wilfredo Alverio, 57, sat outside under his carport Wednesday evening, chatting with a neighbor. A small generator powered most of his house, ensuring that his 88-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer’s, was comfortable in her bedroom.
“These are memories that bring you flashbacks from Maria,” he said, as well as from the last blackout, on Dec. 31. “There’s never a credible explanation” for that one, he said.
His neighbor, Hemilett Pérez, 48, said that years of recurring blackouts had made it difficult to trust officials and their promises regarding the power grid.
“You don’t even know what to believe, nor who you should believe,” Ms. Pérez said.
“I really thought that I lived on the enchanted island, for real, that we lived in paradise, until Hurricane Maria came and stripped off all the bandages that held this country together,” she said. “There’s no end in sight for all of this.”
Laura N. Pérez Sánchez contributed reporting from San Juan, P.R.
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
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