More than 1.3 million people living in Puerto Rico sat in darkness on Tuesday morning after a sweeping blackout washed over the island.
As the country awoke to celebrate New Year’s Eve, a blackout hit, leaving people without electrical appliances, air conditioning, lights and more.
Luma Energy, the private company that oversees electricity transmission and distribution, said on X that the cause of the outage is under investigation but preliminary findings suggest a fault to an underground line. Restoring power could take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours.
As of 10:20 a.m. ET, less than 13 percent of Luma Energy customers had power, according to an online tracker.
“It had to be on the 31st of December!” exclaimed one man, who only gave his name as Manuel, as he stood outside a grocery store in the capital of San Juan, grumbling about the outage that coincided with his birthday. “There is no happiness.”.
A spokesperson for Genera PR, which oversees power generation, did not immediately respond to a request for comment by the Associated Press.
With no idea when power would return, Puerto Ricans began to think ahead.
“I’ll go to my balcony. That’s where I’ll sleep,” Raúl Pacheco said with a resigned shrug, as the 63-year-old diabetic sat on a walker nursing an injured foot.
Julio Córdova, a municipal worker who was raking leaves on a nearby sidewalk, said he got dressed by the light of his cellphone and planned to buy candles.
“This affects me because I had plans. It couldn’t have been yesterday or tomorrow?” he said as he shook his head.
While blackouts are rare in Puerto Rico, the island continues to struggle with chronic power outages blamed on a crumbling power grid that was razed by Hurricane Maria, a powerful category 4 storm that struck the island in September 2017.
The system, however, was already in decline prior to the storm given years of lack of maintenance and investment.
In June, Puerto Rico suffered a large blackout that left approximately 350,000 customers without power.
Some Puerto Ricans took the latest outage in stride.
“They’re part of my everyday life,” said Enid Núñez, 49, who said she ate breakfast before work thanks to a small gas stove she bought for such events.
Additional reporting by The Associated Press
