Hundreds Of Thousands Of Puerto Ricans Still Without Power Amid Dayslong Outage

Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans remained without electricity on Friday after a massive, dayslong power outage on the island. 

On Wednesday night, a circuit breaker at one of the island’s power plants caught fire, causing an island-wide outage . 

As of midday Friday, Luma Energy, the private company that is responsible for power transmission and distribution on the island, said that some 600,000 customers  had had their power restored. This means that of the total 1.5 million households on the island, some 900,000 remained without power . 

“This is horrible,” Luisa Rosado, a mother of two who lives in San Juan, told The Associated Press on Thursday. She complained of recent increases in electricity bills, even as outages have been a problem  for years.

“To increase bills when you don’t provide a perfect service ... the level of impunity is absurd,” she added.

The power company said its efforts to restore electricity to more households were expected to carry into the weekend . 

The outage was one of the largest since Hurricane Maria struck the island in 2017, plunging many in the dark for months . Thousands of people died not only during the storm but in the aftermath without power . 

Even as power company officials in Puerto Rico said FEMA needed to distribute the billions allocated in funding to rebuild the island’s power grid more quickly, FEMA responded by saying Luma needs to provide documentation necessary to begin restoration projects.