Puerto Rico’s power grid suffered an island-wide outage Wednesday, utility officials said, leaving an untold number of people without electric service overnight as workers scrambled to restore it into Thursday morning.
The outage is believed to be related to a problem at the Costa Sur power plant outside the town of Guayanilla, near the island’s southwest coast, Puerto Rican utility company LUMA Energy said.
A fire was visible at the plant in video posted Wednesday night to social media by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.
LUMA Energy is working to restore power to customers, and the exact cause and the number of people affected weren’t immediately known, the utility said early Thursday on Twitter.
“The power grid has suffered a massive island-wide blackout, potentially caused by a circuit breaker failure at the Costa Sur generation plant,” LUMA officials said Wednesday. In that statement, the company said it anticipated restoration efforts would continue into Thursday.
A firefighter battles flames at the Costa Sur power plant Wednesday.
Firefighters extinguished flames that affected two substations at the Costa Sur plant, the Bureau of the Puerto Rico Fire Departments said on Facebook Wednesday. The cause of the fire wasn’t immediately known, fire officials said.
LUMA is a joint venture of Quanta Services and the Canadian energy company ATCO, which the Puerto Rican government chose to take over the operation of the power grid from its previous public electric utility, PREPA. LUMA has been in charge of the power grid since June 1.
