Puerto Rico Vows Full Power Restoration by Weekend Following Ernesto’s Damage  

Puerto Rico: The Electric Power Authority has pledged to restore electricity services across the nation by the end of this weekend following the damage caused by the passing of tropical storm Ernesto.

Officials stated earlier that the schools would receive power by early Tuesday, however, approximately of 40,000 customers remained without power on Tuesday afternoon. “There are some 80% of emergency medical clinics who have received power,” the authorities further noted.

Luquillo, a popular tourist destination, out of all the regions suffered the greatest number of outages with almost 30% of customers without power. Apart from Luquillo, other cities who suffered the damage including Fajardo, Rio Grande, and Yabucoa.

Reportedly, up to 70,000 clients temporarily experienced the power outage till late Tuesday. However, 90,000 other customers experienced the same on Monday due to a manual reduction in power to Puerto Rico’s Power grid.

Notably, the tropical storm that passed the Caribbean caused immense damage everywhere, however in Puerto Rico, it left 7,50,000 clients without power. This damage is reported to be caused due to fallen trees and high winds that destroyed the power lines.

Juan Saca, the President of Luma Energy, a private company that oversees the power distribution in Puerto Rico highlighted that, “It is very annoying, I don’t wish to minimize that.” He noted this while emphasizing that these outages are short.

On the other hand, the President of the island’s House energy commission stated the urgent need of more reliable energy sources for the island nation as he highlighted LUMA to be inefficient in providing power with precision to all.

“With all the damage caused by the storm, and LUMA Energy’s inefficiency in powering with precision and agility, Puerto Rico urgently needs another more reliable energy source,” he noted.

While, Julia Aguilar, Luma’s Dsirector of reliability and distribution automation mentioned that weather is the major contributor to the damage caused to power lines causing outages, and said that it takes 5 years to establish a base and metrics.

“The improvements are going on, they will be seen,” he said.

Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, also stood in Luma’s side while noting that, “In the span of just three days, already 96% of the population had electric service.”

Puerto Rico’s power grid has been struggling to recover since the passage of Hurricane Maria in 2017. While the authorities are continuing repair and upgradation, severe weather are other major challenges faced by the federation causing disruptions.