Puerto Rico was plunged into darkness due to a blackout on New Year’s Eve

Puerto Rico was plunged into darkness early Tuesday morning due to power outages across most of the island.

The cause of the outage is under investigation, but preliminary results indicate a fault in an underground line, according to Luma Energy, the island’s main electricity distributor. It may take 24 to 48 hours for service to be fully restored. The company reported on X.

Only 13 percent of the island’s 1.4 million customers had power at about 1000 AST (1400 GMT), according to the New York Times.

An hour later, power was restored in some areas, as well as at the San Juan Municipal Hospital, Luma said.

The New Year’s Eve blackout prompted repeated calls from elected officials and residents to address the unincorporated U.S.’s ongoing power problems that have continued since 2017’s Hurricane Maria.

The island cannot continue to put up with an energy system that so often fails its citizens, Jennifer Gonzalez-Colon, Puerto Rico’s current representative in the US Congress and future governor of Puerto Rico, wrote on X.

Power outages continue to affect Puerto Rico’s economy and quality of life, she said.

On Facebook, current governor Pedro Pierluisi demanded answers and solutions from the two main energy companies, Luma and Genera.

This year, hundreds of thousands of residents were affected by power outages at the same time. An outage in June left about 350,000 customers without power due to rising temperatures, and more than 700,000 customers lost power after Hurricane Ernesto in August.

Waking up to another day without power, Puerto Ricans expressed their frustration to the American media.

“They are part of my daily life,” Enid Nunes, 49, told The Associated Press of the blackouts.

Puerto Rico’s power system was strained even before Hurricane Maria devastated the island. US government funding has helped strengthen the grid, facilitate recovery projects after other natural disasters, and make other important infrastructure improvements.

But implementation has been incomplete due to various factors, such as problems getting construction started and Federal Emergency Management Agency requirements to authorize some of the funds, as of February 2024. the report from the US Government Accountability Office.

“It’s unforgivable that the power grid still hasn’t recovered from the damage from Hurricane Maria,” Mark Levin, president of Manhattan in New York, wrote on X.

New York is home to the largest Puerto Rican community in the US mainland.

“That’s 3.5 million American citizens,” he wrote. “We owe them much better.”