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Vox reports [vox.com]

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 [elnuevodia.com].[1] The company responsible was D. Grimm, a subcontractor for Cobra Energy [vox.com], 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 [energy.gov][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 in US history [vox.com] and is now the second-largest in the world [vox.com]. 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

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