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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 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?