About 760,000 of the island’s utility customers had electric service restored, the territory’s power grid operator said Friday evening.
That leaves about 740,000 homes and businesses without power in an outage that has closed schools for two days and caused other interruptions for Puerto Rico’s 3.2 million residents.
“We hope that at some point tonight, we will be able to have 1 million customers back online. This is subject to safety — for the system, for the employees and for the community,” Kevin Acevedo, vice president of LUMA Energy, the operator of Puerto Rico’s power grid operator, told reporters in San Juan.
The company cannot commit to saying when other customers will see power return, according to an announcement on its website.
An unspecified failure led to a fire at the Costa Sur plant outside the town of Guayanilla on the southwest coast around 8:45 p.m. Wednesday, cutting power across the island, Acevedo has said. Firefighters have since extinguished the flames.
All customers on the island lost power initially, Josue Colon, Puerto Rico’s lead telecommunications and infrastructure engineer, told reporters Thursday, “because all the generating units went offline.”
“Every single (piece of) equipment (at the plant’s switchyard) needs to be inspected and tested to make sure that when it’s back in service, we can restore power for customers reliably and safely,” Shay Bahramirad, LUMA Energy’s senior vice president of engineering and asset management, told reporters in San Juan on Friday.
All hospitals were operational by Thursday afternoon, whether their power was restored or they were operating via a generator, according to Secretary of the Interior Noelia García Bardales.
Replacement power plant parts ordered, official says
Firefighters extinguished flames that affected two substations at the plant, the Bureau of Puerto Rico Fire Departments said Wednesday.
The cause of the fire is being investigated, Acevedo said Thursday morning, adding that the equipment was up to date on maintenance inspections.
Cleanup at the plant is underway, and replacement parts have been identified and ordered, Acevedo said.
CNN’s Rafy Rivera, Stefano Pozzebon and Michelle Watson contributed to this report.