Cain Alto, Puerto Rico
“I asked the contractors if they were going to connect the cable to the post and they just didn’t answer,” said Pagan, a 23-year-old garage worker.
After an eight-month, $3.8 billion federal effort to try to end the longest blackout in United States history, officials say Puerto Rico’s public electrical authority, the nation’s largest, is almost certain to collapse again when the next hurricane hits this island of 3.3 million people.
“It’s a highly fragile and vulnerable system that really could suffer worse damage than it suffered with Maria in the face of another natural catastrophe,” Gov. Ricardo Rossello said.
Another weather disaster is increasingly likely as warmer seas turbocharge the strongest hurricanes into even more powerful and wetter storms. Federal forecasters say there’s a 75 percent likelihood that the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, which begins today, will produce between five and nine hurricanes. And there’s a 70 percent chance that as many as four of those could be major Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricanes, with winds of 111 mph or higher.
“It’s inevitable that Puerto Rico will get hit again,” said Assistant Secretary Bruce Walker, head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity, which is planning the long-term redesign of the grid run by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.
Despite the billions plowed into the grid since Maria hit on Sept. 20, 2017, Puerto Rican officials warn that it could take far less than a Category 4 storm like Maria to cause a blackout like the one that persists today, with some 11,820 homes and businesses still without power.
“The grid is there, but the grid isn’t there. It’s teetering,” said Hector Pesquera, commissioner of public safety. “Even if it’s a (Category) 1, it is in such a state that I think we’re going to lose power. I don’t know for how long.”
Federal officials and Puerto Rican leaders blame decades of mismanagement that left the island’s power authority more than $9 billion in debt after declaring bankruptcy last year. Expensive projects were launched then cancelled. Politicians approved cheap power for well-connected corporations. By the time Maria hit, wooden power poles were rotted, transmission towers had rusted through and overgrown trees menaced thousands of miles of power lines.
In many places across Puerto Rico, federal emergency funds allocated in the aftermath of the disaster made up for years of neglected maintenance, replacing decaying infrastructure with tens of thousands of new poles and hundreds of miles of power lines rushed from the U.S. mainland at a steep premium.
But in other areas, crews without adequate supplies patched together damaged poles and power lines in a desperate push to restore power. In the western highlands, power cables were spliced together and woven haphazardly through trees in blatant violation of basic safety codes. In Pagan’s town of Cain Alto and at least one other location, trees were used as makeshift power poles in the absence of proper equipment.
“We patched things up. We worked with the little material that was available and we recycled material. We took the 1,000 feet of wire that was on the ground and we strung it up in another area,” one power authority worker said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from management. “We took the post that had fallen over or broken and we put it up somewhere else. A lot of the work is defective.”
Fredyson Martinez, vice president of the power authority workers’ union, said he estimates that roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of the repair work done over the last eight months did not meet basic quality standards.
“The logistics were terrible. I give it an F,” he said. “Things need to be fixed.”