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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: 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.