New Year's Eve Power Outage Plunges Puerto Rico into Darkness

As Puerto Rico faced an island-wide blackout during New Year's festivities, only 13% of its 1.4 million customers had power. Elected officials and residents alike urged for reforms to address the ongoing energy crisis, which has plagued the territory since Hurricane Maria.

In a shocking turn of events, Puerto Rico entered the New Year with much of the island in darkness following a significant blackout that occurred early Tuesday morning. Luma Energy, the primary electricity provider for the region, reported that the party atmosphere was disrupted by nearly island-wide power failures. The cause is still being investigated, though initial assessments indicated an issue with an underground line.

Luma Energy anticipates that fully restoring electricity could take between 24 to 48 hours. As per reports, at around 10:00 AST (14:00 GMT), a mere 13% of Puerto Rico's 1.4 million power customers had their electricity restored. However, by the following hour, power had been restored in select areas along with vital services, including San Juan's municipal hospital.

The blackout ignited fresh outcries from both local officials and citizens about the ongoing energy challenges the unincorporated US territory faces, which have lingered since the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017. "The island cannot endure an energy infrastructure that repeatedly fails its people," voiced Jenniffer González-Colon, Puerto Rico's current US congressional representative and the incoming governor. She expressed this sentiment on social media, highlighting the detrimental impact blackouts have on both the economy and residents' quality of life.

Pedro Pierluisi, the current governor of Puerto Rico, took to Facebook to demand solutions from Luma Energy and another primary power company, Genera. The community's frustration echoes throughout the island, where hundreds of thousands have faced power outages this year alone. Notably, a June incident left approximately 350,000 residents in the dark during a heatwave, and an August outage impacted over 700,000 customers due to Hurricane Ernesto.

As Puerto Ricans began another day without power, the sentiment of frustration was palpable. "Blackouts are just part of my daily life," lamented 49-year-old Enid Núñez in an interview with the Associated Press.

Even before Hurricane Maria struck, Puerto Rico's power grid was already under considerable strain. Although US government funding aimed at strengthening the grid exists, various factors—such as construction delays and stringent FEMA regulations—have hampered progress, resulting in incomplete recovery efforts, as noted in a February 2024 report from the US Government Accountability Office.

Mark Levine, New York City's Manhattan borough president, who represents a large Puerto Rican community, echoed the sentiment of many, expressing his disappointment on social media: "Inexcusably, the power grid has still not recovered from Hurricane Maria's devastation. This is 3.5 million American citizens, and we owe them so much better."