San Juan and its surrounding areas were plummeted back into darkness on Wednesday when yet another power outage hit Puerto Rico. This is the second massive blackout in two weeks as another citywide outage occurred just last Thursday. This one, however, had the distinction of taking place shortly after Governor Ricardo Rosselló tweeted about it—thanking the Puerto Rican power authority for its work and that they had successfully restored power at half its normal capacity.
Earlier in the morning, Governor Ricardo Rossello had told his 140,000 Twitter followers that the Puerto Rican power utility had reached a short-term goal of getting power output back to 50 percent of normal levels, adding the hashtag, “#PRSeLevanta," or Puerto Rico pulls itself up.
The celebration lasted till the lights went out. A statement from the power agency said a technical problem in a plant was responsible for the outage.
Ironically, about an hour after Rosselló’s tweet, San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz weighed in. Throughout this disaster, Yulín Cruz has been an outspoken advocate for the people on the island. She has consistently kept it real about what’s happening, and her response to the governor was no exception.
Translation: “Governor, I believe that your percentage has just changed. The power went out at the Centro Médico (Medical Center of Puerto Rico), and Hospital Municipal (San Juan Municipal Hospital) and the CRIM—Centro de Recaudación de Ingresos Municipales (Municipal Revenue Collection Center)”.
Talking about speaking truth to power. It’s important not to let government off the hook here, especially when hospitals are busy trying to keep people alive with no power or supplies—almost two months after the hurricane.
One of the incredibly disturbing and frustrating things about this situation is that people in San Juan have, for the most part, been better off than people in other parts of the island (at least as far as access to power). So if Puerto Rico’s capital city continues to experience frequent power disruptions or has yet to have power restored in certain areas, we can only imagine that rural parts of the island have yet to have electricity since this disaster struck.
Moreover, people are not getting what they need because no one in Washington wants to listen to folks on the ground who say they know what needs to happen. FEMA spent over $35 million on generators that local engineers say are unnecessary and are slowing down the process of restoring power.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency spent $35.1 million on renting two emergency generators to help power blacked-out San Juan, Puerto Rico. But a group of engineers says existing infrastructure could have been used more effectively at a fraction of the cost.
The mobile turbine generators, fully connected as of last week, bring some 50 megawatts to the partially idled Palo Seco plant west of the capital. That’s intended to stabilize power supply, at least in neighborhoods where distribution lines are intact.
Yet the Puerto Rico Professional College of Engineers and Land Surveyors said a better alternative was to turn on some of Palo Seco’s existing facilities to provide at least five times more power, according to a report delivered to local lawmakers and an interview with the organization’s president.
This is such a clusterfu*k. Everything that could go wrong here is. And so much of it is preventable. The leadership on both the island and in Washington is abominable. Meanwhile, the people of the island continue to suffer unnecessarily. It’s tempting to sarcastically ask how much worse can this possibly get, but, sadly, the answer truly is terrifying.