Power restored to nearly all customers in Puerto Rico after island-wide blackout, officials say

Power was restored early Friday to nearly all customers in Puerto Rico after an island-wide blackout hit earlier this week, authorities said.

More than 1.45 million customers – or about 98.8% – had electricity less than 48 hours after the outage hit, according to Luma Energy, which oversees the transmission and distribution of power on the island.

“Although restoration is nearing completion, some customers may continue to experience temporary outages due to limited generation,” Luma said.

The blackout hit Wednesday afternoon as the largely Catholic residents of the U.S. territory prepared to celebrate the Easter weekend. A transmission line failed, which then caused generators across the island to protectively shut down, officials said. It also left more than 400,000 customers without water at the time.

It was the latest in a string of major outages on the island in recent years – the last major blackout happened fewer than five months ago on New Year’s Eve.

It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the failure this time, although authorities are investigating whether a series of breakers failed or if overgrown vegetation is to blame.

“Preliminary analysis points to a failure in the protection system as the initial trigger, followed by the presence of vegetation on a transmission line between Cambalache and Manatí,” Luma said Wednesday. “This sequence of failures triggered a chain of events that resulted in an island-wide outage.”

Gov. Jenniffer González said she expected to receive a preliminary report in the upcoming days.

Thousands of Puerto Ricans fumed over the latest blackout, with artist Bad Bunny saying in Spanish on X, “when are we going to do something?” apparently referring to the outage.

Outages have been a chronic problem for Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria destroyed a power grid when it struck the island as a Category 4 storm in September 2017. Just after crews said they were starting to rebuild the grid in 2022, the island was hit hard by Hurricane Fiona.

The grid had already been deteriorating due to decades of a lack of maintenance and investment.