Electricity has been restored to more than 80 percent of customers affected by an outage that plunged the entire island of Puerto Rico into darkness after an excavator struck a transmission line, officials said Thursday.
The Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority said more than 1.1 million of its clients got their power back after Wednesday’s blackout, which came almost seven months after Hurricane Maria struck.
Utility workers hoped to restore power to the remaining 326,000 customers later in the day, officials said.
The power line failure in southern Puerto Rico sparked the first blackout to affect the entire US territory of 3.4 million people since Maria slammed into the island Sept. 20 and crippled its electrical grid.
The blackout was caused by the failure of a 230-kilovolt line between the oil-fired Aguirre generating complex in Salinas and AES Corp.’s coal-fired power plant in Guayama, according to the utility.
Prior to the outage, more than 44,000 customers were still without normal electric service lost after the storm.
Some have been without electricity even longer as a result of Hurricane Irma, which brushed past Puerto Rico’s northeast coast as a Category 5 storm on Sept. 7 and left 1 million customers without power.
One of them, university student Jonathan Rodriguez, 22, told the Associated Press: “I knew we’d be without power for some time, but not this long.”
Rodriguez lives in the central mountain town of Corozal with two relatives who need electricity to survive. His grandmother depends on insulin and his aunt on equipment to prevent sleep apnea.
Nearly every day after work, Rodriguez drives 20 minutes to the nearest gas station to buy fuel that keeps a donated generator running 24 hours a day.
The US Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing federal power restoration efforts, said it expects the entire island to have its power back by late May.
But many remain pessimistic and a group of federal lawmakers has asked the US Federal Emergency Management Agency to extend the Corps’ assignment past May 18 to make sure all Puerto Ricans are once again connected to the fragile power grid.
The Power Authority has been in bankruptcy since July with a debt of about $14 billion.
With Post wires