September 18, 2022

All of Puerto Rico Is Without Electricity as Hurricane Fiona Hits the Island

Almost five years to the day after Hurricane Maria plunged the island into darkness.

Three people inside a house await rescue from the floods caused by Hurricane Fiona in Cayey, Puerto Rico. Stephanie Rojas/AP

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The entire island of Puerto Rico lost electricity on Sunday as Hurricane Fiona made landfall, battering the US territory with heavy rains and wind gusts over 100 mph.

That’s more than 1.4 million people experiencing power outages, almost five years after Hurricane Maria killed a few thousand people there and left the island without electricity for months—the second longest blackout ever documented globally.

President Biden on Sunday approved an emergency declaration for Puerto Rico, allowing the federal government to give more assistance for disaster relief on the island. The National Hurricane Center said the storm would produce “life-threatening flash flooding and urban flooding across Puerto Rico and the eastern Dominican Republic, along with mudslides and landslides in areas of higher terrain.” In Puerto Rico’s central and eastern regions, according to the Washington Post, some rivers and streams have already flooded into residential areas.

After Hurricane Maria in 2017, the US government was criticized for a slow and insufficient response. For weeks, people on the island lived without electricity and endured long lines to get food, water, and toiletries, all of which had been rationed. The vast majority of Puerto Rico’s electrical transmission and distribution system was destroyed by that storm, and efforts to repair the damage has dragged on even as residents pressured local politicians and the US government to improve recovery efforts. Last year, FEMA announced it was awarding $9.4 billion to the state-run Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which generates electricity, and this year the federal agency said it was allocating another $107 million to make the island’s power infrastructure more dependable.

On Sunday, Luma, the private consortium that now has a contract to oversee Puerto Rico’s power transmission and distribution, requested “patience” as its officials worked to restore electricity to the island, something that they estimated could take several days. But even before the power outage began, Abner Gomez, the consortium’s head of public safety and crisis management, tried to assure nervous residents that Fiona would not be as bad as past storms: “This is not Maria,” he said, according to CNN. “This hurricane will not be Maria.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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