Power line in Puerto Rico keeps failing
UPDATE (10:40 a.m. ET, Thursday Nov. 16, 2017): Story corrected and updated to reflect statement from Whitefish Energy that the company was not to blame for the recent outages.
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.
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.
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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" when a crane damaged the line.
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In a statement to Mashable, a spokesman for Whitefish Energy denied that work the company had done played a role in Wednesday's power failure, and instead blamed issues with the Puerto Rican utility company, known as PREPA.
"The outage in Puerto Rico on Wednesday, just like the one last week, has absolutely nothing to do with the work performed by Whitefish Energy on the 50100 transmission line. That line was turned over to PREPA several weeks ago and our crews are no longer in the area as they are working elsewhere on the island," said Whitefish Energy spokesman Chris Chiames, in an email.
A statement from PREPA cited a "technical failure" with the 50100 transmission line.
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.
Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
