The recovery in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria has faced way too many bumps in the road to believe that anything associated with this disaster is normal. After months of no power, food and gas shortages, and a dismal government response at all levels, many Puerto Ricans were once again plunged into darkness temporarily on Sunday night after a fire at an electric substation.
Two power plants that were knocked offline by the fire were repaired by dawn, while crews were still trying to repair two substations, power company spokesman Geraldo Quinones told The Associated Press. Power had returned to Puerto Rico’s largest public hospital and its main international airport.
Quinones said he could not provide any numbers on how many customers remained without power as a result of Sunday’s outage, which affected the island’s northern region.
Sadly, no one knows what caused the fire. It’s also unclear if the fire is related to a mechanical malfunction or the result of the crumbling infrastructure of the island, which was in abysmal condition prior to the hurricane. Regardless of why it happened, its just another reminder of how poorly this disaster has been handled and how crippled Puerto Rico has been by greed and exploitative policies over the course of several centuries.
The outage adds to the woes of an island still struggling to fully restore power more than five months after Hurricane Maria started the longest blackout in U.S. history. More than 400,000 power customers remain in the dark after the Category 4 storm destroyed two-thirds of the island’s power distribution system and caused up to an estimated $94 billion in damage. […]
In many cases, power workers are repairing equipment that should have long been replaced but remained online due to the power authority’s long financial crisis. The state-owned power company is worth roughly $4 billion, carries $9 billion in debt and has long been criticized for political patronage and inefficiency. It also has suffered frequent blackouts, including an island-wide outage in September 2016.
In a wave of what is known as “disaster capitalism,” a number of companies are now positioning themselves to profit from Puerto Rico’s devastation and tragedy.