An island-wide blackout hit Puerto Rico on Wednesday as the largely Catholic residents of the US territory prepared to celebrate the Easter weekend. All 1.4 million clients on the island were without power, Hugo Sorrentini, spokesman for Luma Energy, which oversees the transmission and distribution of power, tells the AP. "The entire island is without generation," he says. It was not immediately clear what caused the shutdown, the latest in a string of major blackouts on the island in recent years. Gov. Jenniffer González, who was traveling, said officials were "working diligently" to address the outage. Authorities said it could take days to fully restore power, the New York Times reports.
Dozens of people were forced to walk 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. The last island-wide 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 had already been deteriorating as a result of decades of a lack of maintenance and investment.
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