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Another blackout hit Puerto Rico Wednesday morning [April 18], the Associated Press reported, cutting off electricity across the whole island and once again undermining the fragile progress made in restoring power in the [seven] months since Hurricane Maria struck.
The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority said that it could be 24 to 36 hours before power is restored to the areas that had it. Its priorities are to get electricity back to hospitals, the San Juan Airport, water systems, and financial centers
The outage was caused by a bulldozer hitting a power line while trying to remove a collapsed transmission tower, according to El Nuevo Dia.[1] The company responsible was D. Grimm, a subcontractor for Cobra Energy, which received a $200 million contract to repair Puerto Rico's devastated power grid.
Cobra was selected alongside Whitefish Energy Services in the aftermath of the hurricane, but the deals drew scrutiny from Congress because the companies had limited experience in grid repair on such a large scale.
[...] more than 61,000 utility customers[PDF] haven't had electricity since last September, the US Department of Energy reported earlier this month. Since "customer" typically refers to a household, which can encompass several people, estimates indicate that more than 100,000 people haven't had power since the storm.
[...] The blackout is the largest[2] in US history and is now the second-largest in the world. Only Typhoon Haiyan, one of the largest tropical storms ever to make landfall and the deadliest storm ever to hit the Philippines, had a bigger impact on electricity service.
[1] En Español
[2] As measured in millions of customer hours of lost electricity service.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:32AM (25 children)
My electricity goes out all the time. Whenever there is a big storm (average of once every 3-5 years), it is out for 2 weeks. Whenever this happens most of the neighbors (the ones who don't have whole house generators yet, which is constantly decreasing) move to hotels or friend's houses.
One time there were two storms in a row and the power was out 2 weeks, then on for a week, then out for another 2 weeks. I thought that was pretty bad; life basically came to a standstill. It was hard to get anything done and most of the time was unproductive. The first few days are fun, after a week it gets really old. After two you are totally out of stuff to do.
7 months would just completely destroy everything. It is hard to even imagine. Does everyone just have a generator now (presumably federal money went into this)? Has every business gone under by now? Or...seemingly more likely, has everyone just moved out of the affected areas into places where power has already been restored?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:43AM (4 children)
Solar panels (standalone, or on flashlights) and batteries are in constant use, but for a fridge...
Just spent 9 figures blowing up three buildings in Syria, still leaving millions of citizens in the dark or at the mercy of a single mishap. I'm so glad we have such fucked-up priorities in the most powerful country in the world.
Compare to the reconstruction of the other Caribbean islands hits by the same hurricanes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:02AM (2 children)
Compare to the reconstruction of the other Caribbean islands hits by the same hurricanes.
Cuba, in particular.
Those folks have their shit together.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday April 19 2018, @03:56PM (1 child)
?!?!??!??? You said what?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @12:58AM
Well, I've said here before, "Switch off Lamestream Media. It's filling your head with nonsense."
Instead of "Heck of a job, Brownie" accolades for someone who is doing a TERRIBLE job, Cuba is actually organized to respond to emergencies and that preparedness avoids e.g. what Puerto Rico is going through, what Houston went through (and still is), and what New Orleans went through (and still is).
Cuba was back on its feet while Puerto Rico/USA was still scratching its ass.
You need better sources of information--instead of the hegemonic propaganda fed to you by crap sources with a nationalist agenda.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:26PM
You often see corporate pundits in the media ask "How can we afford that?" when it comes to anything that helps the common person (such as single payer). But the corporate media never asks that same question when it comes to the military; I guess we have unlimited funds for that.
It's disgusting how the vast majority of these media pundits are supporting attacks in Syria, and using smears ("So I guess that means you love Assad!") that are similar to the ones used against people who opposed the Iraq war. Yeah, sure, we're doing this for human rights reasons, and yet we're allied with... Saudi Arabia. Principled non-interventionism is nowhere to be found.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:08AM (8 children)
I'm not sure I've had a significant power cut in my life, unless you include the time that a house down the road caught fire and they turned off the power to the street (which, personally, I wouldn't count). The power was back on within the hour.
I know that we don't really get the very bad weather (UK), but you would think that anything of significance in terms of a population centre you could power reliably quite easily.
To have power out for two weeks would be REALLY long. Seven months is just third-world country material.
That's not to say that I'd be personally affected but it shouldn't be up to me to provide utilities, and certainly shouldn't be up to the little old granny down the road who needs her freezer, heater and cooker to keep on working.
It's disgusting that you can even go that long without power, clean water, etc. in a supposedly advanced country.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:46AM (6 children)
I lived through the blackout in 2003 in New York City. It was in August, so a good day to get free ice cream. One of the best cakes I've ever had, the Brooklyn Blackout Cake (think, "Death by Chocolate"), was invented by a bakery near me because they had to use all their perishable ingredients. It was the only time I've ever been able to see the stars that well, here, and it was amazing to be able to go up to the roof and see the Milky Way yawning over the entirely dark city.
It was not the end of the world.
In a city like New York it would have been difficult to continue its primary industries without the computers, but let's remember that even it, and every other place, existed for a long time before electricity was even invented. So in a place like Puerto Rico, which is not a hub for manufacturing or knowledge work, they should have been able to cope after a period of adjustment. All the problems you listed, food preservation, cooking, heating, water, were solved without electricity a long time ago.
But for me, Puerto Rico's experience is another spur to move to distributed power generation by putting solar panels on your roof and a wind turbine on your property (provided, of course, that wind speeds where you are suffice) and adding a battery to smooth capacity over time. Independence and resilience are virtues in an inconstant world.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:29PM (5 children)
Absolutely.
But it's not that simple.
For a start, I live in a country where solar /wind power, especially for heating, is so impractical as to be useless. Plus I don't own enough roofspace to make it viable even if I could afford the panels and was prepared to take the hit. Literally, I wouldn't be able to heat the house or shower most of the year, and the panels wouldn't pay back their purchase cost.
Then you have that all the other methods of heating are either illegal (e.g. burning wood isn't really viable for more than burning garden waste in or around any major city, and even wood-burning stoves have to burn approved fuel and can't do it at all in smoke-less zones) or require preparation (e.g. gathering lots of wood) or lots of manual labour (sure, granny might find a friendly woodcutter, but we know the trouble that gets you into).
It's not "end of the world" but it's certainly "suspension of modern life". We all do that at some point, deliberately or not, to go camping or whatever. But it's not anywhere near as comfortable or viable as you might think, especially if you've known nothing else. Run a scout group in a large city and you'll find out quite how many kids can't cook, light a fire (or sustain it), catch food, etc. etc. etc. That's not new either, we're several generations down the road of most people NOT being able to do that.
If you lost power in a major city nowadays, you're not far from the old "deny a meal three meals" concept - when they have not frozen or chilled food available, and nothing to heat up a tin of soup without having to gather materials, then you're into the point where modern civilisation is certainly tested even if it doesn't result in utter collapse.
When the temperature blips down a bit for a flash-storm, you get a spike of old people dying because they just can't cope with it. Such things as an extended power cut in, say, London would result in deaths. Maybe even riots. Certainly a suspension of modern lives that people would talk about for decades afterwards.
Sure, I'll be quite happy. I'll break out my camping gear and start improvising some gadgets. But without power, even petrol pumps (gas stations) won't work, so you can't even power your generator without getting in range of a fist-fight at the local filling station. Everything becomes a struggle again.
What happens in terms of business, industry, etc.? Who cares? They'll recover or not. But it's the effect on households and people that won't. Everything from running water (how's that work if they have no power) to cooking food, heating (or cooling) the home to transport, gathering food and supplies to dealing with things like burglaries and looting (no alarms!).
Electricity is one of the basic things that once you get it, you can't really take it away from people without risking some kind of degradation of society. There isn't a society in the world (that I can think of) that's truly reverted from electricity/Internet back to not having it by choice. There's a reason for that.
Pre-electrical eras were hard-living. People expect their 1/3rd leisure time these days and that would just evaporate, despite us being MUCH better off nowadays in terms of generation, lighting requirements, etc.
We can't go hoping that we can fuel the nation with renewables if we can't even manage to keep a country supplied with the electricity that we have no problems generating.
(Note: My employer has a large solar install, covering most of its roofs, in a property that spans a 28 acre site. It's maintained regularly. It's built in the last few years. It's very expensive. I just had a look at it. It would just about boil a kettle at the moment, if you were happy to wait a while for it).
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:04PM (2 children)
Chaos can follow electricity outages, but does not necessarily. New York City is as big as they come, but chaos did not ensue during the 2003 blackout. People walked home, offered total strangers rides if they lived further out, and helped each other out. It was extraordinarily orderly, and completely spontaneous. So many non-New Yorkers love to imagine the city as vicious and predatory, but that was not in evidence.
What did happen, as far as coping skills are concerned, is that people who do know how to rough it or make do without electricity, became local heros for a time. They taught others. And, New York being a city of immigrants from all over the world, there was no shortage of people who grew up in mud huts in Africa or shacks in the backwoods of Appalachia, who had those skills.
There is an adjustment period, to be sure, but people can be remarkable adaptible when they have to be. Losing power is not the end of the world, it's just a different world.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:02PM
During the NYC blackout in 1977, I was in Vermont at summer camp and missed all the fun. There was plenty of looting and mayhem and I (sadly) had no part in it.
During the blackout in 2003, I was in California at a family function and missed that too. However, the only looting shown on the news was that of a donut store in Flushing [wikipedia.org] (right next to an electronics store that was not looted). This strongly implies that it was the police [wikia.com] that were involved in that.
As a life-long resident of NYC, it was odd that I managed to avoid both of the city-wide black outs of the last forty years.
N.B.: My neighborhood did not suffer any power outages from Hurricane Sandy [wikipedia.org], although, horror of horrors, my window sills did get quite damp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:26PM
Do you recall what the cause of the blackout was?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:14PM (1 child)
Sewage is the real problem. You can drink out of the local river (well, I would filter it but animals and pets are unaffected so humans probably would survive off river water) and plenty of people fish the local river for fun, but when the sewage treatment plant anywhere local or upsteam shuts down and dumps untreated into the river, its all over. Nothing but 500 foot deep wells (admittedly all diesel backups; I have a diesel engine maint mechanic cousin who worked the maint contract for the pump stations)
I imagine even the sheer smell of a river turned into a cesspool would be problematic aside from disease.
Most residential buildings are still constructed to survive without electricity, enough openable windows, etc. Many (most?) large commercial buildings are definitely not. Pitch black, 150F in the summer, 100% humidity until the black mold destroys the building...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 20 2018, @10:29AM
That might be true elsewhere, but NYC for one gets its water from upstate and that's gravity fed. Sewage flows into the harbor, which the ocean kindly flushes every few hours.
The smell would suck for the first couple of days, but the nose adjusts quickly. Ask people in farm country if they notice the smell of livestock.
Hot weather is much less fun without AC, but survivable. If the power went out long term people would rediscover dormers and other tactics used before electricity, and which many buildings in NYC still have (my 120-yr old building in Brooklyn does).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:02PM
In the UK a "big storm" is a minor thunderstorm about ten times per year. In the American Midwest we have fifty minor thunderstorms per year on average. There are much more dramatic weather patterns down south; I spent some time in Redstone Alabama and it seemed like we had tropical daily thunderstorms for most of the summer, and I know daily afternoon Tstorms are normal in Florida year around, so they claim.
So the UK idea of a thunderstorm is hearing thunder a couple times per year, but there are plenty of parts of the USA where a big one every couple years is a non-rotating thunderstorm end of the world cats and dogs living together make peace with your maker the world is ending. Which probably happens in UK less than once per century.
Something cool that we have in the midwest that I've lived thru a couple times, like once every two decades or so, is the weather gets primed and pumped to set off storms but its just stable enough over a thousand miles to pump up more and more heat and humidity and then you get a storm MASER or LASER effect where you get a thousand mile gust front going at 80 MPH takes about half a day to sweep from end to end, kinda destructive, very much a linear tornado. UK being too small for 1000 mile wide storms, etc etc..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:46AM (9 children)
5% of the population is expected [washingtonpost.com] to move to the US mainland by the end of this year.
And we have this prediction:
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:52AM (7 children)
Super. More neighbors wrapping their cars in Puerto Rican flags, lolling out their windows screaming "Puerto Ricoooo!" for 3 days surrounding the Puerto Rican Day Parade, blasting music.
Every year I wonder the same thing: What the heck is the source of the pride they have in Puerto Rico? The island has never produced great literature or art of any kind, has not made great leaps in Mathematics or Science, has not won epic battles upon which history pivoted, or anything of the kind. It's as perplexing as if Iowans were to behave similarly, with the rest of us scratching our heads and saying, because you grow corn...?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @11:58AM
> What the heck is the source of the pride they have in Puerto Rico?
Dunno. Hamilton? (Both the dude and the musical.)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:55PM (4 children)
They've invaded and taken over a country? (the USA?)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:11PM (2 children)
How does an island of 3 million people invade and take over a country of 350 million people by sending over 200,000 of those 3 million people? They haven't even managed to invade and take over a city or even a borough of NYC. They sort of have Washington Heights in Manhattan, but when they kick up a ruckus around the Puerto Rican Day Parade the Dominicans who constitute the other half of that neighborhood mock them mercilessly (mostly in good fun, with many exchanges of "Pendejo!" and "Maricon!"). They're just loud and obnoxious then, but otherwise harmless.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by VLM on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:39PM (1 child)
Its sort of like US military in Iraq, sure the locals outnumber us 1000 to 1 but we tell what passes for local government to jump and they ask how high, we can go where ever we want including your land and do whatever we want but you can't, that kind of thing.
The crime rates and lack of educational achievements are not good, but better than some of the locals. Imagine replicating five Detroit, making them somewhat higher performance educationally and somewhat lower crime, not a huge amount but obviously better than the Detroit locals, those numbers would statistically be Puerto Rico. Somehow I don't think either Detroit-ians or Puerto Ricans would enjoy the comparison, but its factual and accurate. If you significantly upgraded Detroit but it was still pretty dumpy, then quintupled it into an island, that's P.R.
Yeah and the italians on columbus day and the irish on st patties, eh. I'd worry more about most of them can't read and they feed the prison industrial complex, admittedly not as bad as some locals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:29PM
Jesus you're a fucktard.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM
PR is *part* of the USA, you complete fucking moron. You know what? With this post, you have officially discredited yourself with your own ignorance; you're shown yourself to be too uninformed for anyone to take anything you say seriously. God *damn,* people like you are too dumb to live...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:11PM
As they taught me [youtube.com] in elementary school (P.S. 84 [nyc.gov]):
Note that I am of Irish and Eastern European extraction and have no ties to Puerto Rico.
For those of you with poor spanish skills, here's the English translation:
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:09PM
When the grid goes down in Los Vegas, or the water taps stop working, I suspect continental Americans will move faster, but that's because there's no moat to cross.
A better analogy would be something like Katrina/New Orleans. As near as I can tell from the graph I found on images.google.com, NO went from 500K to 200K in like a week, then has spent a decade asymptotically re-approaching 400K.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:31PM
We "modern" people don't do so well without our energy slaves. Kind of like southern plantations after the US Civil War, when they lost their human slaves.
Bucky Fuller noticed this a long time ago and coined the term: http://www.eoht.info/page/Energy+slave [eoht.info]