April 18, 2018

Puerto Rico, Still Reeling from Hurricane Maria, Is Hit by an Island-Wide Blackout

Millions of Americans are without power.

Ricardo Arduengo via ZUMA Wire

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Puerto Rico’s power grid collapsed again on Wednesday, according to multiple reports.

The grid has been unstable since Hurricane Maria devastated the island in September. In the town where the storm made landfall, just 35 percent of residents had power when Mother Jones reporter AJ Vicens visited last month.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz tweeted about the collapse on Wednesday morning, calling it a return to the day Maria first struck Puerto Rico. 

Officials say it could take 24 to 36 hours to restore power to the island, home to more than three million American citizens.

In a series of tweets in the afternoon, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello identified the culprit: an excavator that hit a crucial power line. Rossello blamed the outage on Cobra, an energy company contracted to restore the island’s electrical infrastructure, saying it was “directly responsible.” Cobra’s contract was increased to $945 million in February.

Earlier in the day, ranking House Democrats from the committees on energy and commerce, transportation and infrastructure, homeland security, and national resources wrote to Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Brock Long, asking him to extend the Army Corps of Engineers’ assignment in Puerto Rico. The assignment—to help restore electricity—is currently scheduled to end on May 18.

This post has been updated to reflect new developments.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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