It’s been nearly two months since Category 4 Hurricane Maria slammed Puerto Rico, leaving behind immense devastation. On Wednesday morning, the island took another step backward, as the lights went off in San Juan once again.
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Shortly after the storm, the island’s government signed a controversial $300 million deal with a little-known Montana company known as Whitefish Energy to restore power to parts of the island. Yet the island continues to experience major problems with its fragile electrical grid.
As of Monday morning, power had been restored to about 50 percent of the island. That’s when a power line known as the Cambalache Manatee line failed, again, plunging San Juan and other cities into darkness.
Confirmed: power out in Puerto Rico – Cause unknown, as of now.
It just so happens, that Gov. @ricardorossello had been heralding November 15th (today) as a goal of being at 50% generation, on the 56th day after Maria. https://t.co/4ycaEfSFQS— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) November 15, 2017
Se reporta falla en línea de 230KV de Cambalache a Manatí. Personal de AEE se acerca al área para identificar el problema y restablecer el 50% de generación alcanzado. CC6
— AEE (@AEEONLINE) November 15, 2017
This is the second time in a week that this particular line has failed, affecting the parts of Puerto Rico that actually had restored power.
On Tuesday, the first outage was blamed on “human error.”
PREPA reports power out in Puerto Rico due to “failure of the Cambalache Manatee 230KV line”
*This is the same line where there was failure last week
-Yesterday, PREPA boss Ricardo Ramos said last weeks outage was caused by a “crane”, signaling human error caused it— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) November 15, 2017
It’s also the line that Whitefish Energy has worked on as part of their controversial, and now canceled, contract with the island.
As Mashable’s own Andrew Freedman noted, the $300 million contract breaks down like so:
Those are big bucks for work on a line that seems to be repeatedly failing and already under intense scrutiny.
On Tuesday, officials were in the hot seat for a Congressional hearing. Documents released by the House Committee on Natural Resources showed that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s (PREPA) contract with Whitefish was extremely troubling, particularly the approval of the contract despite internal calls of concern.
This is a developing story…
