San Juan, Puerto Rico — A massive power outage affected nearly all of Puerto Rico early Tuesday as the U.S. territory prepared to celebrate New Year's Eve. According to Luma Energy, the private company that oversees the island's power transmission and distribution, more than 1.2 million of its 1.47 million customers were without power.
LUMA the statement said that it will likely take 24 to 48 hours to restore power to the island “conditions permitting.”
“While the cause of the outage is under investigation, preliminary results indicate an underground line failure,” the company said.
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Reuters quoted Ivan Baez, a spokesman for Puerto Rico's primary power generator Genera, as saying the grid failure was believed to have been caused by a problem with a line operated by LUMA, but it also knocked out plants owned by Genera and some other private power generators.
This was stated by the governor of Puerto Rico, Pedro Pierluisi post on social media that his administration was in talks with both LUMA and Genera “regarding the massive blackout affecting a large portion of the island due to a critical fault.”
He said that work was underway to restore power and that the government “requires answers and solutions from both LUMA and Genera, which should speed up the restart of generator sets outside the disaster area and properly inform people of the measures they are taking to restore. island wide service.'
However, speaking to Telemundo late Monday, Jose Colon, head of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, said it could take a few days to fully restore service.
Puerto Rico continues to struggle with chronic power outages caused by the collapse of the power grid destroyed by Hurricane Maria.a powerful Category 4 storm that hit the island in September 2017. The system was already in decline before the storm due to years of lack of maintenance and investment.