An island-wide blackout hit Puerto Rico on Wednesday as the largely Catholic residents of the U.S. territory prepared to celebrate the Easter weekend, a power company spokesman said.
All hospitals the island are operating on generators after the power went out at 12:38 p.m. Eastern Time, Veronica Ferraiuoli, acting governor and secretary of state for Puerto Rico, said at a news conference. The source of the outage was in the southern part of the island where a transmission line was affected, according to Josué Colón, executive director of Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority.
All 1.4 million clients on the island were without power, Hugo Sorrentini, spokesman for Luma Energy, which oversees the transmission and distribution of power, told The Associated Press. “The entire island is without generation,” he said.
Restoring the power will likely take through Thursday, or at least 48 hours, Colón said. At least 78,000 customers were also without water, according to the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority.
It was not immediately clear what caused the shutdown, the latest in a string of major blackouts on the island in recent years. The last major blackout occurred less than five months ago on New Year’s Eve. Gov. Jenniffer González, who was traveling, said officials were “working diligently” to address the outage. Ferraiuoli said the governor is trying to return as soon as possible.
Dozens of people were forced to walk next to the rails of the rapid transit system that serves the capital, San Juan, while scores of businesses including the biggest mall in the Caribbean were forced to close. Professional baseball and basketball games were cancelled as the hum of generators and smell of smoke filled the air.
“Following today’s island-wide power outage, our administration is actively engaged in ongoing communication with the White House and all relevant federal agencies,” the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration said in a statement. “We are working closely with the federal government to ensure that Puerto Rico receives the necessary support and that all essential services are restored as quickly and safely as possible.”
Puerto Rico has struggled with chronic outages since September 2017 when Hurricane Maria pummeled the island as a powerful Category 4 storm, razing a power grid that crews are still struggling to rebuild. As the island was just starting to rebuild, it was hit hard again by Hurricane Fiona in 2022.
The grid already had been deteriorating as a result of decades of a lack of maintenance and investment.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the Puerto Rico government in 2021 hired Luma, a private Canadian-American company based in San Juan, to handle the transmission and distribution of electricity on the island. Power was previously overseen by the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which went bankrupt in 2017 as the government faced billions of dollars in public debt payments.
