SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Vox reports
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, @01:11PM (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.