The entire island of Puerto Rico lost power Wednesday morning-- its second major outage in a week.
The Puerto Rican power grid was already weak before Hurricane Maria. Adrian Florido, a reporter for NPR who’s been on the island for four months, said it’s not uncommon for the lights to go off.
“Smaller blackouts happen all the time,” Florido said. “They’ll affect specific smaller neighborhoods or maybe one city or one region, but not the entire island.”
More than six months after the storm, Puerto Rico’s power authority reports that about three percent of the island is still in the dark. Six days ago, a tree fell and 870,000 people lost power.
Florido was writing a story Wednesday in his apartment in Old San Juan when he noticed something was up.
“Once you’ve been through a few of these, you start to recognize the sound of a blackout,” Florido said. “And the sound is: everything just kind of goes quiet. It takes like half of a second to register what’s happened and you realize ‘Oh, the power’s gone.'”
Other than a report of a transmission line failing, Florido said not much is known about this power outage.
