April 7 (UPI) — An island-wide power outage still has a majority of the 3.2 million residents of Puerto Rico without electricity, although crews had restored power to some 300,000 customers by Thursday afternoon.
The outage happened late Wednesday night, and the exact cause remains under investigation, the island’s utility provider, LUMA Energy, said in a statement, although there was a fire at the Costa Sur power plant outside the town of Guayanilla.
“We have completed the initial damage assessment at Costa Sur and are now performing a detailed site assessment to determine operability of breakers and associated equipment. We are targeting to have 1,000 MW of generation power online by midnight tonight [Thursday],” the company said in a statement on its website.
pic.twitter.com/DM5cAGpTJm— LUMA Puerto Rico (@lumaenergypr) April 7, 2022
The electrical provider has been issuing routine updates since the U.S. territory was plunged into darkness Wednesday evening.
Businesses and government offices remained closed through the day Thursday, in what is the island’s biggest power outage so far this year. At least 1.2 million of the utility’s customers remained without power as of 4:30 p.m. EDT Thursday.
LUMA did not have an estimate when power would be restored fully, and said operations could last through the remainder of Thursday and into Friday.