Nearly half of Puerto Rico’s municipalities experienced widespread power outages across all neighborhoods during or after Tropical Storm Ernesto’s passing last week. The storm barely brushed the Island and stayed about 35 to 40 miles North of San Juan. Many of the affected municipalities are in the West or southwest regions, where the storm’s winds were barely felt.

Three days after the event, LUMA Energy, the private company responsible for the transmission and distribution of electricity in Puerto Rico, has yet to explain the causes of such widespread power outages resulting from Tropical Storm Ernesto, which remained over the Atlantic Ocean with winds around 55 miles per hour. Nor has LUMA provided an estimate for when the power will be restored, leaving half of the population without electricity.

Juan Saca, president of LUMA, acknowledged that “we haven’t seen anything catastrophic” in the electrical system but mentioned “a lot of damage throughout the system” due to fallen trees on power lines and equipment knocked over by “weather conditions.” He stated that they are still “in the process of understanding where the most damage is” while expressing satisfaction that, allegedly, there were nearly 400,000 clients  without power on Thursday, down from more than 700,000 the previous night. “The number of clients without service has dramatically decreased… So, we’re doing well in terms of recovery.”

“Until we finish that assessment, we can’t give the people of Puerto Rico a specific time or date [for when the system will be restored],” Saca said during a press conference, with Governor Pedro Pierluisi by his side, assisting him in answering the journalist’s question by stating that the important thing was to “increase the number of people with service.”

Saca repeated what Pierluisi was telling him into the microphone. The following day, Friday, after that press conference, LUMA stated they aimed to have 90% of the service restored by Sunday.

The Governor appeared frustrated when the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) asked him during the press conference why the recovery process was slow, particularly in the Carolina northeastern region, as LUMA’s website does not specify which municipalities it includes. At the time of the press conference (1:55 p.m. Thursday), 60% of clients in that region, amounting to 85,555, were without power. As of 9:35 a.m. on Friday, that number had risen to 93%, affecting 131,799 customers. For each customer without service, an estimated three people could need electricity, considering that is the average number of residents in Puerto Rican households, according to the most recent Community Survey.

“It’s common sense that we know the eastern area was the most impacted by the tropical-storm-force winds and, in some cases, even hurricane-force winds […] I’m saying this because it doesn’t surprise me that restoring service in the eastern area is taking longer,” the Governor said. Municipalities in the eastern zone received between three and 10 inches of rain.

During a tour of the Carolina region, the CPI observed that much of the impact on the electrical grid is related to the lack of maintenance of power lines, many of which are entangled in trees and branches. Alejandro González, the line operations director for LUMA’s central-southern region, acknowledged that “there is a vegetation problem here; the system is out of control, the vegetation is out of hand. We’re working [on the problem].”

González added that they started working on vegetation management three years ago. Juan Saca, for his part, said “the problem is that trees have grown under the lines for decades” adding that “we need to clear them before we can start maintaining the lines.”

In the Dark

The CPI contacted all 78 municipalities’ mayors to understand how they experienced the outages in their neighborhoods, given the lack of clarity from the maps provided by LUMA on its website and the vague responses from the government, which has remained hands-off in demanding accountability from the private operator.

Neither LUMA nor the Puerto Rican government has provided precise information on the energization of municipalities and the percentage of clients with service per town, as the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) used to do.

Even LUMA’s Director of Press and Digital Media, Hugo Sorrentini, told the CPI that the company lacks the ability to know the status of electrical service in each municipality. This is even though mayors and municipal staff need this information as they are the first line of response and support for citizens during emergencies.

“Right now, I don’t have the data on which municipalities might be without electrical service,” said Sorrentini.

When asked about the dozens of mayors who claimed that their municipalities were 100% without electricity, Sorrentini said it was possible that this had happened, but he insisted that LUMA could not identify which municipalities were completely blacked out. Although he acknowledged that LUMA does have this data that comes from the feeders, he assured that they do not organize it by municipality. Prepa used to update this information when there were blackouts due to emergency situations.

On Wednesday, while Ernesto was moving away from the northeast coast, the CPI asked Sorrentini for a breakdown by municipality of the 750,000 clients that the company claimed were without service, and he said that LUMA could not provide that information because it was not collected that way. He explained that the system has a total of 1,127 feeders distributed across six regions, and these lines — which serve between 500 and 10,000 clients each — cross multiple municipalities.

He assured that to know how these clients are distributed by municipality, they would have to manually check all 1,127 feeders and collect the information manually, which would take a long time.

“We don’t have statistics by municipality because the system works by operational regions, as the feeders of the lines that go from the feeders to the communities cross several municipalities,” he said. “Until we have those smart meters (for each client), we can’t know how many meters we are talking about and where they are,” he added. The installation of 1.5 million smart meters would take at least three years at a cost of $875 million.

However, former interim executive director of PREPA, Justo González, told the CPI that LUMA has the capability to know the status of the system by municipality in real-time. For example, he explained that the power company has a data collection system that, among other things, can associate the phone number of the customer who calls to file a complaint with the meter number, and that information is recorded at a central information hub located at the substations, and from there to the commercial area, where all customer information is stored.

On Wednesday, LUMA announced that it would no longer accept service interruption complaints from citizens through its website and mobile app, reported Metro. No explanation was given for this decision and affected people were asked to call 1-844-888-5862 instead.

Power Outages Across Puerto Rico

Of the more than 60 mayors who responded to the CPI, either personally or through their spokespeople, 30 said their municipalities experienced 100% power outages at some point, and in many cases, for several hours. In the case of Patillas, in the southeast, and Canóvanas in the northeast, the CPI found on Facebook pages, such as the mayor’s or the town hall’s, that they were also completely without service. Fajardo in the East, and Lajas in the South, made this public through various media outlets.

Another 17 municipalities had between 60% and 95% of their sectors without power at some point from Tuesday, when the storm began, through Thursday. The mayors said the percentages are estimates based on reports they received from the people and visits by municipal staff and the mayors themselves to the neighborhoods.

According to a spokesperson for Mayor Miguel Romero, approximately 40% of San Juan’s population was without electricity.

The luckiest municipalities were Cataño, Toa Baja, and Manatí, all in the North, which reported only 1%, 3%, and 10% of their residents without power, respectively.

Most of the municipalities that were completely in the dark are in the central and eastern regions of Puerto Rico, including the offshores municipalities of Vieques and Culebra.

Several mayors, such as Dorado’s Carlos López, a member of the Popular Democratic Party, complained through the media that coordination with LUMA has been inefficient. Mayors have been invited to virtual meetings on the Zoom platform, where only company representatives speak, and they are not allowed to ask questions or expose their priorities. Instead, they are advised to send them via email. The press officers of the municipalities of Ponce and San Juan, Eduardo Questell and Aníbal Jover, respectively, wrote separately to the CPI that communication with LUMA has been non-existent. The director of the Office of Planning, Territorial Management and Economic Development  in Loíza, Yeidy Mar Escobar Del Valle, echoed this sentiment.

William Alicea Pérez, the mayor of Aibonito from the New Progressive Party, said no one had power on Wednesday. His neighbors in Coamo, Salinas, Cayey, Cidra, Comerío, and Barranquitas were also completely in the dark.

Coamo Mayor Juan Carlos Garcia Padilla, from the Popular Democratic Party, said that at 5 a.m. on Wednesday, 100% of the municipality lost power due to the collapse of the backup line (number 4800).

Barranquitas’ Mayor Elliot Colón Blanco, from the New Progressive Party, said although they were initially told that the power outage was caused by the self-protection system, he believed the situation had become more complex because the winds that blew during the day brought down some lines and poles.

“There has been a lot of rain here, but little wind. There is no reason why 100% of my city should be without service. There has been no communication from LUMA to inform us of the condition of the system or to anticipate when the service will be restored. That’s my frustration because it seems we haven’t learned from (hurricane) Fiona (2022), when precisely for this reason, the municipalities had to step in to restore the grid,” said Villalba Mayor Luis Javier Hernández, from the Popular Democratic Party, who also chairs over the Puerto Rico Mayors Association.

Juana Díaz’ Mayor Ramón Antonio Hernández, from the Popular Democratic Party, expressed a similar sentiment, stating that more than half of the residents had been in the dark since early Wednesday morning. When asked about the cause of the power outage, the mayor blamed “the total handover of PREPA to private companies, resulting in shoddy work.” He added, “The incompetence demonstrated by LUMA” because, according to him, he did not see any fallen poles in his town that could have caused the power outage or delayed its restoration.

Municipalities in the western region, where the storm’s winds were least felt, also lost power across 50% to 100% of their territories.

“The reality is that here in Lajas, the [electrical system] damages were minimal, nothing that couldn’t have been resolved in less than 24 hours, but this is how LUMA operates,” said Lajas Mayor Jayson Martínez, from the New Progressive Party and a former PREPA employee, on his personal Facebook page. “It’s frustrating how this company, which has millions of dollars to strengthen the electrical system and improve it, has left us without power for two days when nothing happened,” he lamented.

By contrast, Hormigueros Mayor Pedro García, from the Popular Democratic Party, attributed the power outage in his town to the fact that it is supplied by the Las Acacias substation. This substation is in a flood-prone area and is very old, so it goes out every time there are heavy rains.

Arroyo Mayor Eric E. Bachier Román, from the Popular Democratic Party, said that 85% of the town lost power from 2 a.m. on Wednesday until about 7:30 p.m. that same day. Rincón experienced up to 90% of customers without power, according to a spokesperson for the town’s mayor, Carlos López Bonilla, also from the Popular Democratic Party.

Arecibo Mayor Carlos Ramírez, from the Popular Democratic Party, said more than half of the population had electricity in their homes on Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, but by Thursday, the number of people without power had risen to nearly 80%.

Voltage fluctuations in Arecibo damaged the motor and fuses of the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority’s (AAA) Dos Millones pumping station, causing it to shut down and leaving thousands of customers without water in sectors of Arecibo and Hatillo.

The power outage also interrupted drinking water service in several sectors across all municipalities. On Friday, 257,000 AAA customers were still without potable water in their homes, according to the corporation’s Executive Director, Doriel Pagán, as El Vocero reported. Pagán noted that of the 50 filtration plants in operation, 31 were operating with generators.

Most mayors did not know exactly why their towns experienced total or partial power outages. Some municipal executives, such as those from Sabana Grande, Aibonito, and Comerío, mentioned the collapse of distribution lines as the reason for the power outage in their towns. On Thursday night, there was a fire at a Carolina substation that once again left people without power after it had been restored. Another outage affected sectors of Hatillo and Arecibo last night.

“Imagine if a real hurricane hit. We would be without power for months and months,” said San Sebastián Mayor Javier Jiménez Pérez, who is running for governor with the Dignity Project party.

Journalists José M. Encarnación, Eliván Martínez, and Vanessa Colón Almenas contributed to this story.