Puerto Rico’s fragile power grid suffered another massive failure after Tropical Storm Ernesto dealt a glancing blow to the territory and left 645,000 customers without electricity.
President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for Puerto Rico on Wednesday, enabling the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide federal disaster assistance for all 78 municipalities in the U.S. territory.
The storm, which the National Hurricane Center upgraded to a hurricane at 11 a.m. as it heads toward Bermuda, has brought heavy rains and strong gusty winds and could cause dangerous flash flooding in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which also saw thousands of customers lose power.
About 56 percent of the 1.5 million customers in Puerto Rico were without power as of 10:45 a.m. Wednesday, according to LUMA Energy, the private manager of the grid owned by Puerto Rico’s public utility. The worst-hit areas are the Caguas region in the central mountains of Puerto Rico, where nearly 167,000 customers lost power; the Carolina region in northeast Puerto Rico, where more than 115,000 customers do not have electricity; and Ponce in the south, where 143,000 customers have no power.
