Hotels were near capacity, with thousands of tourists celebrating Easter vacations on the island. Tourism officials rushed to reassure them that many hotels and other businesses were operating with generators.
"It is unacceptable that we have a failure of this magnitude in the transmission of the electrical system," said Gov. Jenniffer González, who cut short her weeklong vacation and flew back to Puerto Rico on Wednesday night.
Officials said 90% of clients would likely have electricity 48 to 72 hours after the blackout occurred.
It was not immediately clear what caused the shutdown, the latest in a string of major blackouts on the island in recent years.
Thousands of Puerto Ricans were fuming over the latest outage, with many renewing their calls that the government cancel the contract with Luma and Genera PR, which oversees generation of power on the island.
“This is a total disaster,” said Orlando Huertas, 68, as he sipped a drink with a friend at a streetside bar and criticized the government for not doing enough to tackle the chronic outages.
Dozens of people were forced to walk on an overpass next to the rails of the rapid transit system that serves the capital, San Juan, while scores of businesses including the biggest mall in the Caribbean were forced to close. Professional baseball and basketball games were cancelled as the hum of generators and smell of smoke filled the air. Traffic became snarled as police officers were deployed to busy intersections.
Reggaeton superstar Bad Bunny echoed the collective rage, writing on X: “When are we going to do something?”
The governor pledged late Wednesday that she would cancel the contract with Luma, but noted that while government officials have started analyzing the contract and finding possible replacements, it wouldn't be a quick process.
González also said that she has requested an in-depth investigation into the blackout, noting that officials already have warned there won't be enough generation of power for this summer, when demand peaks.
“Puerto Rico can’t be the island where the power goes out all the time,” González said. “We’re going to take action. Let people have no doubts.”
While power restoration on the main island of Puerto Rico was moving slowly to protect equipment, emergency generation stations restored power to the tiny neighboring island of Culebra and parts of neighboring Vieques, said Josué Colón, the island’s so-called energy czar and former executive director of Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority.
Those without generators crowded around grocery stores and other businesses to buy ice across Puerto Rico.
“I'm desperate. My generator is broken,” said Carmen Suriel, who worried about the impact of the blackout on her two children, a six-month-old and a five-year-old with Down syndrome, as the temperature rose across Puerto Rico on Wednesday.
Alma Ramírez, 69, said she was frustrated with the constant outages, some of which had already damaged her TV and microwave, forcing her to buy new appliances.
“They have to improve," she said of the government. “Those who are affected are us, the poor.”
The island of 3.2 million residents has a more than 40% poverty rate, and not everyone can afford solar panels or generators. While there was a push to use more renewable energy sources under the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, which provided Puerto Rico with mega generators and other resources, experts worry that won't happen under U.S. President Donald Trump.
Roughly 117,000 homes and businesses on the island have solar rooftops. Meanwhile, petroleum-fired power plants provide 62% of Puerto Rico's power, natural gas 24%, coal 8% and renewables 7%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Daniel Hernández, vice president of operations at Genera PR, said at a news conference that a disturbance hit the transmission system shortly after noon on Wednesday, during a time when the grid is vulnerable because there are not many machines regulating frequency at that hour.
Verónica Ferraiuoli, acting governor and secretary of state for Puerto Rico, said the White House reached out to local officials and said they are available if needed.
Pablo José Hernández, Puerto Rico's representative in Congress, said he would work to ensure that “Washington understands the real and urgent situation Puerto Ricans face every day.”
“The electric grid crisis is frustrating, and after years of blackouts, it feels like it’s going from bad to worse," he said.
The last islandwide blackout occurred on New Year's Eve.
Puerto Rico has struggled with chronic outages since September 2017 when Hurricane Maria pummeled the island as a powerful Category 4 storm, razing a power grid that crews are still struggling to rebuild.
The grid already had been deteriorating as a result of decades of a lack of maintenance and investment under Puerto Rico's Electric Power Authority, which is struggling to restructure more than $9 billion in debt.
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