The state-owned utility company responsible for generating electricity has gone bankrupt, and mediation to restructure its debt to bondholders ended without a deal last week. Luma Energy, the private consortium hired in 2020 to manage the transmission, has failed to satisfy critics as power outages have increased in length this year, even apart from devastating storms, according to a report last month from Puerto Ricoh Energy Bureau. And a major plan to modernize the island’s power system, funded with billions by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency in response to Hurricane Maria — which killed about 3,000 people and left some residents without power for nearly a year — has been delayed to complete. started. Sin Luz, Life without power “Given all of that, it shouldn’t be surprising that we’re where we are,” Sergio Marxuach, policy director at the Center for a New Economy, a Puerto Rico-based think tank, said by phone from his home in the northern Island’s. shore, which operated on generator power. “What we’re seeing right now is a direct consequence of that failure to act” after Hurricane Maria, he said. Fiona made landfall Sunday afternoon with 80 mph winds and quickly knocked out power to more than 3 million people — or the entire population of Puerto Rico. Luma Energy officials on Monday said power had been restored to more than 100,000 people by Monday afternoon, including in the San Juan metropolitan area, the city’s main hospital campus and the island’s largest airport, but the company has not still offers a detailed assessment of the damage. The extent of Fiona’s destruction remains unclear. The storm’s outer bands continue to receive heavy rainfall and threaten to swell waterways that are already overflowing their banks and trigger landslides in the mountains. Some areas of the big island of Puerto Rico and its eastern islands are still inaccessible, officials said. Governor Pedro Pierluisi said at least two people had died. Puerto Rico National Guard Adjutant General Jose Reyes said Monday that his troops have conducted more than 30 search and rescue operations in 25 municipalities across the island. More than 1,000 people had to be rescued from flooded homes, particularly along the southern coast in the town of Salinas, where one of the largest operations brought 400 people to safety. In Yabucoa, Mayor Rafael Surillo Ruiz said he had never seen flooding like what his community experienced in the past 24 hours. Roads and bridges that had been recently renovated were washed away by rivers. At least two barges saw waters rise several feet, and city workers spent the night and morning rescuing stranded vulnerable residents, including moving bedridden elderly people from their soaked beds, he said. “It’s painful that we’re here again,” Surillo Ruiz said. “Now we’re in not one but two recovery processes: what’s left of Maria, where we haven’t made much progress, and now we have to add everything that happened with this hurricane.” President Biden approved an emergency declaration Monday, and top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials promised a more effective response than five years ago, when the agency acknowledged systemic failures in Maria’s wake. Fiona sent generators humming across the island as residents flouted the routines they learned during Maria. Days before forecasters outlined Fiona’s path, anxiety levels rose and the rush to prepare began. Instead of taking a weekend of rest and relaxation, thousands filled up their gas tanks, scavenged for essentials and steeled their nerves against the trauma the storm would undoubtedly cause. “Even a hurricane that is much smaller in comparison brings back those dark memories and those feelings of anxiety,” said Mariana Ferré, a 23-year-old medical student from San Juan. “The messages I get from all my friends are, ‘I have PTSD.’ “ Maria’s devastating winds severely weakened Puerto Rico’s already antiquated energy infrastructure when it hit the island in September 2017. Since then, routine blackouts, which can often stretch into weeks, have instead become the norm. “It’s so sad,” Ferré said. “It’s so normalized, and it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be normal for people to lose power all the time. People literally depend on electricity to live.” Puerto Rico’s fragile power grid has been at the center of accusations from protesters, customers and utility union members who have called on Pierluigi to cancel the government’s contract with Luma Energy. In recent weeks, Pierluigi made his first public criticisms of the company, echoing what for months has been the rallying cry of critics bemoaning the company’s performance. The U.S.-Canadian power consortium has struggled more than a year after taking over operations of Puerto Rico’s transmission and distribution lines with public perception, frequent outages and at least one blackout. Protests outside their offices in San Juan are regular weekly events, and “fuera Luma,” or “out with Luma,” is as ubiquitous in Puerto Rico as the chant of the coqui, the island’s famous frog. Luma spokesman Hugo Sorrentini said the company’s crews have been hampered by widespread flooding across the island, but that about 1,500 utility workers are “ready to respond” to the outages. Helicopters have been unable to access some of the areas where power lines are down in the mountains as heavy rains continue, he said. Customers that have been restored so far rely mostly on underground power lines. “There are barricades, there are floods, there are rivers that just overflowed,” he said. “It’s a very difficult situation and it’s very complicated, especially with access. But for the next couple of days, we’re going to continue to work and evaluate and recover as best we can.” One of the major vulnerabilities in Puerto Rico’s electrical system is the interstate transmission system. Electricity generation takes place mainly on the island’s south coast, where giant aging power plants send electricity through transmission lines that criss-cross the mountainous interior. The towers stand on steep hillsides, looking over ravines and continuing to the populous north where most of the energy is consumed. During storms, these lines regularly fail. After Fiona, winds knocked out power to at least four of the island’s main transmission lines. Luma said it placed 200 utility workers ahead of the storm and called in another 70 through a back-up brigade to respond to outages. Problems with Puerto Rico’s power grid date back decades and are a source of constant anxiety for many residents. Prices are high and electricity is still mainly supplied by fossil fuels, including oil and diesel, even though local laws mandate a transition to renewable energy in the coming years. Eduardo Bhatia, who was Puerto Rico’s Senate president until last year, said the widespread power outages from Hurricane Fiona make it clear once again that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA, has failed for decades to invest in modernizing the network, operating on infrastructure he compared to “cars from Cuba — 40, 50-year-old equipment.” “How they used the money is a big mystery, but they didn’t make the investments to strengthen the network,” he said. Bhatia added that the storm also showed how desperately the island needs a renewed energy grid. As of 2020, Congress has appropriated about $12 billion for the project—FEMA’s largest allocation of funds in the agency’s history. But bureaucratic delays have hampered the work of modernizing the network. “They need to speed it up,” Bhatia said. Luma Energy officials say the fragile power grid has long been mismanaged and neglected by PREPA, creating unprecedented challenges for its workforce. But the 3,000-employee company, a joint venture between North American companies Atco and Quanta Services, insists the system is in better shape than ever and is set to spend billions in federal funds to rebuild and harden the network. “The system has been in decline for decades. The system itself was already in very bad shape,” Mario Hurtado, Luma’s chief regulatory officer, said in an interview days before Hurricane Fiona. “PREPA was the worst performing utility in America, far and away.” PREPA’s corruption, unreliability, and failures are well documented in congressional hearings, expert testimony, and personal experience. The public utility, which still controls Puerto Rico’s electricity generation, is in bankruptcy and helped drive the US territory’s decade-long economic crisis. Negotiations to restructure the $9 billion debt collapsed again last week. In 2016, a federal fiscal oversight board took control of Puerto Rico’s finances, and local politicians’ long-held desire to privatize the power grid began to take shape. But lax regulation, an overly generous contract and self-dealing plagued the privatization process from the start, critics say. Luma Energy took over Puerto Rico’s transmission and distribution system in June 2021 after a year of studying one of the most complex electricity networks in the country. Arrest warrant for fugitive CEO: Puerto Rico’s effort to privatize its power grid is off to a rough start Thousands of PREPA workers took jobs with Luma, but hundreds of experienced, unionized line workers turned down job offers after learning…
