Large swaths of Puerto Rico were without electricity on Wednesday night after a massive outage resulting from two power plants shutting down.
Concretely, more than 340,000 customers were impacted in the capital of San Juan, as well as neighboring municipalities like Bayamón, Caguas and Carolina.
Governor Pedro Pierluisi criticized the outage and said he was demanding answers and solutions from Luma Energy, which operates power transmission and distribution, as well as Genera PR, which operates and maintains generation units.
"While it is true that we have old plants and transmission lines in terrible condition, the people continue to suffer the consequences of the lack of sense of urgency that private operators are demonstrating," the governor said in a publication on X, formerly Twitter.
San Juan mayor Miguel Romero also demanded answers from Luma as he declared a state of emergency in the capital late Wednesday.
"There are thousands of children with specific feeding needs, as well as older adults who often need therapy machines to protect their health and often save their lives," reads a passage of the decree with the declaration.
Other parts of the island, mainly in the central and southern part, were still struggling to recover from an extended outage of more than seven days earlier this week, to an extent that authorities activated an emergency response and requested food distribution.
Luma Energy officials said that repairs in that region could take more than a month, an announcement that sparked renewed anger at the company.
Puerto Rico's power provision has been extremely unstable over the past years, with the U.S. territory still trying to rebuild its grid after category 4 Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017.
Many in the island have resorted to installing solar panels, but many others are unable to given their cost and the fact that 40% of its residents live under the poverty line.
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