Hurricane Ernesto knocks out power to hundreds of thousands in Puerto Rico

Miami: Hurricane Ernesto left hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans without power Wednesday after its wind and rain pelted the island's frail electrical system.

More than 718,000 customers were still without electricity as of 5:45 pm local time, Luma Energy, the power utility, reported. That amounted to almost half of the nearly 1.5 million customers the utility serves. Entire towns in parts of Puerto Rico were without power.

"This shows how fragile the electrical system is, seven years after Hurricane Maria," said. Luis Javier Hernández Ortiz, the mayor of Villalba, a small town in south-central Puerto Rico that was entirely without power. "In my town, we had a lot of rain, but there was not significant wind."

He and his team toured the town and saw little evidence of fallen power lines. "There is no logical reason why our town has no service," he said in an interview Wednesday afternoon.

Juan Saca, Luma's president and CEO, said in a news briefing that crews were out assessing whether power lines had been knocked out -- which would require lengthier repairs -- or had been brushed by vegetation. A bump from a tree or branch would have automatically shut down the line for safety, Saca said, but would make it easier to restore power.

Alejandro González, Luma's director of operations, said the utility was waiting for weather conditions to improve to send two helicopters to fly over the grid and assess the damage. By Wednesday afternoon, the center of the storm had moved past Puerto Rico.

The Luma executives said it was too early to say when power might be restored.

Power outages "affect the quality of life, and affect what we can do in many areas" to return to normal after the storm, Gov. Pedro R. Pierluisi said.

In 2017, Hurricane Maria knocked out electricity across all of Puerto Rico, exposing the vulnerabilities of the island's antiquated and inefficient power grid. Some people did not get their electricity back for more than a year.

The grid has been plagued by aging equipment, lack of maintenance and past mismanagement and corruption. Luma, a private Canadian-American consortium, took over the transmission and distribution of power in 2021. The bankrupt public utility, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA, remains in charge of power generation. Ernesto did not damage any of the power plants, a PREPA representative said.

Puerto Ricans pay about 40 per cent more for electricity than the average US customer, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Electricity was also hampered in the US Virgin Islands, just east of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. Daryl Jaschen, the emergency management director for the territory, said in a briefing late Wednesday morning that the power was out across the entirety of St. John and St. Croix. There was some power being generated in St. Thomas, he said.

Ernesto became a hurricane Wednesday near Puerto Rico after strengthening in the Caribbean. The storm is expected to strengthen further as it approaches Bermuda by the weekend, according to forecasters.