4 hours ago
3
SAN JUAN – Puerto Rico’s politician connected Monday urged radical to mean their vigor depletion arsenic she warned that the land has nary further procreation to autumn backmost connected days aft a monolithic blackout deed the U.S. territory.
Gov. Jenniffer González said officials are waiting for an mentation from Luma Energy, a backstage institution that oversees transmission and organisation of powerfulness successful Puerto Rico, astir what caused the island-wide outage connected April 16. It affected 1.4 cardinal customers and near much than 400,000 others without water.
The politician announced that 2 subcommittees person been created: 1 to assistance the island’s alleged vigor czar to audit Luma’s declaration and different to place imaginable companies to regenerate Luma if its declaration is terminated.
“There person been aggregate incidents,” she said erstwhile asked whether the blackout was crushed capable to cancel Luma’s contract, thing she pledged to bash portion campaigning for governor. “The relation sold itself arsenic an expert...That cognition of expertise has proven to beryllium false.”
Luma did not instantly respond to a petition for comment.
The institution has 5 days to explicate wherefore a transmission enactment failed and supply details astir whether it complied with required flyovers of transmission lines to guarantee they stay escaped of histrion branches and different obstructions.
A preliminary study from Luma released precocious Friday recovered that a transmission enactment seemingly failed due to the fact that of overgrown vegetation.
“The information that this happened indicates either that the patrol didn’t instrumentality spot oregon that the enactment inspector didn’t observe it. That histrion didn’t turn determination overnight,” said Josué Colón, Puerto Rico’s alleged vigor czar and erstwhile enforcement manager of the island’s Electric Power Authority.
He said protective instrumentality that was expected to observe and isolate the nonaccomplishment besides failed, which caused the transmission strategy to collapse.
“The strategy past enters a cascade lawsuit that is irreversible,” helium said. “The important happening present is that this doesn’t hap again.”
González said Puerto Rico’s authorities has launched its ain probe into the blackout to comparison it to Luma’s study and find immoderate discrepancies.
González stressed that the medication of U.S. President Donald Trump has been successful connection with her since the outage occurred, adding that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency authorized the extended usage of concern generators.
On Monday, immoderate 20,000 customers remained without power, though officials said different issues were to blame.
“Our strategy is fragile,” González said.
Earlier connected Monday, she, Colón and different officials met down closed doors to reappraisal Luma's preliminary findings, urge adjacent steps and speech astir an ongoing hunt for a institution that tin supply 800 megawatts of further procreation successful the upcoming months.
April 16 marked the 2nd monolithic blackout to deed Puerto Rico successful little than 4 months. The erstwhile 1 happened connected New Year’s Eve.
Puerto Rico has struggled with chronic outages since September 2017, erstwhile Hurricane Maria deed the land arsenic a almighty Category 4 storm, razing a powerfulness grid that crews are inactive struggling to rebuild.
The grid already had been deteriorating pursuing decades of a deficiency of attraction and concern nether the state’s Electric Power Authority, which is struggling to restructure more than $9 cardinal successful debt.
____
Follow AP’s sum of Latin America and the Caribbean astatine https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This worldly whitethorn not beryllium published, broadcast, rewritten oregon redistributed without permission.
English (US) ·