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Puerto Rico is still literally powerless. Though Hurricane Maria made landfall as a category four hurricane over a week ago, the storm has left the island almost entirely without electrical power.
The island’s electrical grid was unable to resist the one-two punch of Hurricane Irma followed by Maria. 250-kilometre-per-hour winds and 76 centimetres of rain have left nearly 100 per cent of the island without power. Puerto Rico’s governor Ricardo Rosselló calls the situation a “humanitarian emergency”.
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The lack of power makes it hard to refrigerate food and to run air conditioning – both essential in the hot Caribbean climate. What’s more, pumps that push water for drinking, bathing and flushing toilets aren’t working. On Wednesday, FEMA reported that 42 per cent of the population was without potable water and more than 10,000 people were occupying 161 shelters.
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Nobody knows how long it will take to get the grid back online. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) can’t restore power without assistance, because it filed for bankruptcy in July under a crippling $9 billion debt.
The American Public Power Association (APPA), of which PREPA is a member, says the damage must first be assessed before it can determine how long repairs will take.
“We don’t know if this is going to be a six-month situation, a five-month situation,” says Mike Hyland, APPA’s senior vice president of engineering. “We don’t know if it’s going to be rolling crews in. We don’t know how many linemen from the Army Corps of Engineers will be available.”
Problem after problem
Power was swiftly restored on the mainland US, but the situation in Puerto Rico is far worse, says Alexis Kwasinski at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Manpower is a factor. Places affected by Irma and Harvey benefited from “mutual assistance agreements”, which send electric crews from other states to help with repairs.
The severity of the damage is a bigger issue. Power grids are made up of three parts: generation, transmission and distribution. Typically, hurricanes and similar disasters mostly damage the distribution system, says Kwasinski. That’s what happened in Texas and Florida. But in Puerto Rico all three components have been damaged, so the repair job is bigger.
“More importantly, those states didn’t completely lose power like Puerto Rico did,” says Kwasinksi. “When the whole grid goes down, and you have to begin again from nothing, it’s much more complicated.”
This tricky process is called a black start. The challenge is that big power stations need a supply of electricity to start up, which has to come from smaller generators.
Kwasinski compares the generators that supply a power grid to a group of people holding up a big block of concrete. Once the block is up, each additional person makes it more stable, and with care it is possible to keep it up. But if everyone puts the block down, it takes painstaking work to lift it back up again.
Is anyone watching?
Meanwhile the 3.4 million people of Puerto Rico must do without. Nearly all are without cell service and internet, because 1,360 of 1,600 cell towers were taken out by the storm. Most of the island’s infrastructure in is shambles, road closures make it difficult for emergency responders to reach citizens, and airport closures and plane delays have trapped thousands on the island.
President Trump declared a state of disaster on 21 September, yet media attention remained minimal.
One reason Puerto Rico hasn’t garnered as much attention as the aftermath of Harvey and Irma is that many Americans don’t realise Puerto Ricans are US citizens, says Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He and his colleague Kyle Dropp recently published poll results showing that people who did know Puerto Ricans are US citizens were more likely to support federal aid.
“As millions of Americans are without electricity and access to potable water, it’s certainly plausible that public pressure will mount,” says Nyhan. “More US citizens live in Puerto Rico than some US states, and we’d never accept, say, the state of Utah being without power.”