Crews worked early Thursday morning to restore power in Puerto Rico after yet another entire-island blackout.
The outage began past noon on Wednesday and left 1.4 million customers without electricity and 328,000 without water. It impacted the main international airport, hotels and several hospitals, The Associated Press reported.
By the end of the day Wednesday, 16 percent of people had power restored and officials said they expect that 90 percent of customers will have it back within 48 to 72 hours after the initial outage.
Luma Energy said it was investigating the cause of the incident, including the role that the “already recognized fragility” of the island’s electrical system had during this outage.
Luma said it was prioritizing restoring power to “critical facilities,” including hospitals and airports.
It’s the second massive power outage to hit the island in just a few months.
On New Year’s Eve, a blackout hit nearly all of the island. Luma said the outage was caused by a failure of an underground power line, but expected it would take multiple days for power to be restored.
Days later, Luma announced 99 percent of the power was restored but predicted there would be a power shortage that would result in temporary rotating outages and urged customers to conserve energy.
This time, power generator Genera said the power outage was due to the “unexpected shutdown of all generating plants” on the island.
It’s the latest in a series of outages hitting Puerto Rico since September 2017, when Hurricane Maria hit the island and damaging the power grid that crews still struggle to rebuild, the AP reported.
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