Power has been returned to just over 40% of Puerto Rico following an island-wide blackout on Wednesday, the territory’s energy distributor has said.
The loss of power affected the main international airport, several hospitals and hotels filled with Easter holidaymakers.
The blackout also worsened traffic, forced hundreds of businesses to close and left those unable to afford generators scrambling to buy ice and candles.
It was not immediately clear what caused the shutdown.
The outage hit shortly after noon local time (5pm UK time) on Wednesday and left 1.4 million customers without electricity and 328,000 without water.
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Crews have been working to restore electricity and at least 175,000 customers, or 12%, had power back at the end of Wednesday.
Luma Energy, which provides power to the whole of Puerto Rico, said in a post on X that power had been restored for around 609,711 customers – representing 41.5% of its total customer base – as of 7am local time (12pm UK time).
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Meanwhile, officials expect 90% of customers to have power back within 48 to 72 hours of the outage.
The outage marks the second island-wide blackout to hit Puerto Rico in less than four months, with the previous one occurring on New Year’s Eve.
The roar of generators and smell of fumes filled the air as a growing number of Puerto Ricans renewed calls for the government to cancel its contracts with Luma Energy and Genera PR, which oversees the generation of power on the island.
Jenniffer Gonzalez, the governor of Puerto Rico, promised to heed those calls.
Ms Gonzalez, who cut her holiday short and returned to Puerto Rico following Wednesday’s blackout, said: “That is not under doubt or question… It is unacceptable that we have failures of this kind.”
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Ms Gonzalez said a major outage like the one that occurred on Wednesday leads to an estimated daily revenue loss of $230m (£174m).
Ramon C Barquín III, president of the United Retail Center, a non-profit organisation that represents small and medium-sized businesses, warned that ongoing outages would spook potential investors at a time that Puerto Rico urgently needs economic development.
“We cannot continue to repeat this cycle of blackouts without taking concrete measures to strengthen our energy infrastructure,” he said.
Many were concerned about Puerto Rico’s elderly population, with the mayor of the town of Canovanas deploying brigades to visit the bedridden and those who depend on electronic medical equipment.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Vega Alta municipality opened a centre to provide power to those with lifesaving medical equipment.
Daniel Hernandez, vice president of operations at Genera PR, said on Wednesday that a disturbance hit the transmission system shortly after noon, a time when the grid is vulnerable because there are few machines regulating frequency at that hour.
Puerto Rico has struggled with chronic outages since September 2017 when Hurricane Maria pummelled the island as a powerful Category 4 storm, razing a power grid that crews are still struggling to rebuild.
The grid had already been deteriorating as a result of decades of a lack of maintenance and investment.
