Hundreds of thousands were without power and the mayor of San Juan declared a state of emergency
Indignant Puerto Ricans took to social media to condemn recurrent power outages that have been plaguing the U.S. territory since the beginning of the month.
The biggest one yet occurred Wednesday night, leaving more than 340,000 customers without electricity as the island grappled with heat warnings.
Residents shared images of their worn-out candles and videos of their blacked out neighborhoods overcome by the deafening rumble of generators.
Even Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, who just wrapped up a string of sold-out concerts in his homeland, posted a line of his hit song “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”) on X on Wednesday night.
The song and its music video, in part, address how power outages have become more common over the last several years in Puerto Rico, even without a weather-related event.
“This disaster is without bad weather. Protect us from storms and hurricanes,” Telemundo Puerto Rico journalist Valeria Collazo pointed out in an X post shared by Bad Bunny.
The outages have reignited calls from frustrated residents to oust the private companies that recently took over power generation and distribution after Hurricane Maria devastated the U.S. territory’s already fragile and disinvested electrical grid in 2017.
According to Luma Energy, the private company in charge of the island’s power transmission and distribution system, the outage was tied to “failures in two transmission lines” between San Juan, the capital, and Aguas Buenas, a southern town.
