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A massive blackout hit Puerto Rico early Tuesday — and it could take days to restore power.
The outage, which happened around dawn, left nearly 90% of the private power company Luma Energy's 1.47 million customers without power, the company told The Associated Press.
Luma said the issue appeared to have stemmed from the failure of an underground cable, though it also said the cause was still under investigation. The utility said that fully restoring power could take 24 to 48 hours.
On social media, Luma said it had begun restoring power in phases. The utility said that by 11 a.m. Eastern it had restored power to the Municipal Hospital of San Juan, among other locations. It said that as of 1 p.m. it had restored power to 44,700 customers, or about 3% of its customers without power.
On Tuesday afternoon, at least 1.2 million customers remained without power throughout the US island territory.
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Puerto Rico has for years dealt with a sometimes rickety power system, highlighted in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022.
Luma is in charge of distributing energy across the island, while a company called Genera PR provides the power. The New York Times said both had been under scrutiny because of the territory's frequent outages.
Ryan Pamplin, the CEO and cofounder of BlendJet who's based in Dorado, Puerto Rico, told Business Insider that Tuesday's blackout was "definitely the worst that I've seen in four years of living here."
"I've never seen — even during a hurricane — I've never seen the entire island lose power," he said.
Pamplin said power wasn't the only problem during a blackout. He said water pressure in Puerto Rico is typically low, and pumps are used to help increase it — but when the power goes out, so do the pumps. He said he'd never seen the water pressure in Dorado drop so low.
He added that there was no water coming out of his faucets on Tuesday and that only one of his toilets was sort of flushing.
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In a statement posted on Facebook, translated by The Times, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said, "We are demanding answers."
He said the two power companies "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."
The widespread outage comes as the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, has been trying to restructure its debt, which the AP said stood at more than $9 billion.
Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, argued on X that the federal government needed to step up and "end this cycle of insanity" as the island grapples with its unreliable electric grid.
A report from the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at CUNY said more than 1.1 million Puerto Ricans lived in the New York metropolitan area in 2022.
Puerto Ricans have been treated as second class citizens for far too long.
— Andrew Cuomo (@andrewcuomo) December 31, 2024
The fact that, as Americans, they don’t have a reliable electric grid and suffer sporadic blackouts on a continuous basis is indefensible and would not be tolerated anywhere else in the United States.… https://t.co/Vw7asn7s04
Pablo José Hernández Rivera, the incoming resident commissioner of Puerto Rico — the territory's nonvoting member of the House of Representatives — said in a statement that he'd alerted federal officials to the urgency of Tuesday's situation.
"Once sworn in, I will collaborate closely with Congressional leaders and the incoming administrations in Puerto Rico and the United States to deliver real, lasting solutions," he said. "Our people deserve reliable energy and a brighter future — we will not settle for less."
The governor-elect of Puerto Rico, Jenniffer González, who's set to be sworn in on Thursday, also highlighted the territory's ailing power grid on social media.
"We can't keep relying on an energy system that fails our people," González said on X. "Today's blackout and the uncertainty around restoration continue to impact our economy and quality of life."
She said that stabilizing Puerto Rico's energy grid would be her top priority when she takes office.
