Puerto Rico is a gorgeous Caribbean island and an unincorporated U.S. territory. Been there a couple of times and always had a great time - nice people and gorgeous scenery. Unfortunately, their economy is in the terlit because of some bad decisions from their government. Maintenance on utilities has been deferred for way longer than it should have been. Case in point - from Miami, Florida station WSVN:
Puerto Rico hit with island-wide blackout after fire erupts
A big fire erupted at an electricity plant that powers most of Puerto Rico on Wednesday, causing a blackout that swept across the U.S. territory of 3.5 million people.
The Electric Power Authority said two transmission lines of 230,000 volts each failed. Executive Director Javier Quintana told reporters that he expected most power to be restored by Thursday morning.
Puerto Rico’s fire department said it had extinguished the blaze at the southern power plant, which serves a majority of customers on the island.
A bit more - Garcia is Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla:
“I assume complete responsibility,” Garcia said of the outage. “Everyone knows that the company’s maintenance problems began decades ago.”
The power company is struggling with a $9 billion debt that it hopes to restructure as it faces numerous corruption allegations. Company officials have said they are seeking more revenue to update what they say is outdated equipment.
Garcia, however, said that no amount of money or maintenance would have prevented the fire.
Nice for him to fall on his sword but I call bullshit - stuff like this does not happen out of the blue. There are always smaller incidents - oil leaks, failures during periodic tests, smaller outages and since none of these cause a catastrophe, it is easy to sweep them under the rug and say everything is fine. The problem is that these are an escalating chain of problems that will end up as what just happened today.
Don't forget that it is electricity that runs the water treatment plants, the traffic lights, the radio stations and a host of other needed services. Time to look into getting a ham radio license and getting on the air... $100 in hardware and another $300 for a couple of solar panels, deep cycle batteries and a good inverter.
It's an old oil plant that was supposed to have been shuttered in favor of a new Gas power plant several years ago. But the feds have been blocking harbor improvements required for the gas delivery on ecological grounds. Therefore the old polluting plant was being kept going with bandaids -- they can't start the new low-pollution low-CO2 plant because the greens won't allow it.