Half of Puerto Rico lost electricity Wednesday as the Tropical Storm Ernesto strengthened into a hurricane off the northern coast of the United States’ most populous overseas territory.
Nearly 84% of San Juan still had electricity around 4 p.m. as heavy rainfall lashed the island.
But in Carolina, the municipality bordering the sprawling capital city to the east, almost 80% of households lost power, according to data from the utility LUMA Energy.
In Mayaguez, Ernesto’s winds of up to 75 miles per hour proved powerful enough to plunge 76% of the west coast hub into darkness, with the percentage ticking upward throughout Wednesday afternoon. The blackouts on the south coast in Ponce, Puerto Rico’s second-largest city, and in Caguas, the municipality in the central mountain range, followed a similar trajectory, with no less than 67% of households losing service.
In total, the share of Puerto Rico without power fell a slim fraction of one percentage point shy of 50% on Wednesday afternoon. LUMA said in a statement posted on X that its personnel “will conduct field inspections as soon as it is safe for our crews to go into the field to identify damage and begin repairs.”
Flash flooding covers a roadway after Tropical Storm Ernesto moved through Dorado, Puerto Rico, on Aug. 14, 2024. Ernesto grew into a hurricane on Wednesday.
LUMA, a private company that took over electricity sales from the state-owned utility in 2021, said its “priority is to restore service to critical loads including hospitals, water and sewer facilities.”
Atmospheric conditions that caused surface winds to blow in a different direction from winds higher up weakened the hurricane and may have spared Puerto Rico a wider disaster, said Rosimar Rios-Berrios, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
“Even though that helps in that we’re seeing a relatively weak hurricane and not a powerful one, it can also lead to very heavy rainfall,” Rios-Berrios, whose family still lives where she grew up in central Puerto Rico, said by phone Wednesday afternoon.
She forecast the rainfall to taper off by Thursday.
The storm is following a similar trajectory to Hurricane Fiona, which struck Puerto Rico in September 2022 , deluging neighborhoods in as much as 30 inches of rain and leaving nearly 1 million households without power in a territory with a population of about 3.3 million individuals.
The whole infrastructure of the island is so delicate, especially the power grid, and these storms are very strong. Rosimar Rios-Berrios, National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientist
While hesitant to attribute a weather event to the long-term trend of rapid global warming, Rios-Berrios said climate forecasts for this storm-prone part of the Caribbean show an increased likelihood of heavy rainfall and a larger fraction of powerful hurricanes.
“What might be an effect of climate change is the copious amount of rainfall,” she said. “Climate predictions agree that as ocean waters continue to warm, hurricanes may be able to produce more rainfall, which can lead to more catastrophic flooding.”
The latest blackout is likely to inflame the political blowback against LUMA, which many Puerto Ricans blame for weekly if not daily outages and among the highest electricity rates in the U.S.
The territory’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, Rep. Jenniffer González-Colón (R-P.R.), won the ruling pro-statehood party’s gubernatorial primary this year campaigning on her opposition to the controversial deal that turned over control of the grid to LUMA, a joint venture between a Texas energy company and a Canadian one.
Last summer, more than 100,000 Puerto Rican households lost power amid a record-breaking heatwave. Another historic heatwave in June this year led to blackouts that threatened entire towns with no electricity for over a month.
Watching basic infrastructure buckle under extreme weather as a scientist monitoring meteorological real-time data from thousands of miles away, Rios-Berrios said it’s impossible not to worry.
“I take all of these cases very personally,” she said.
“Every time I see a case like Hurricane Ernesto — or, to be honest, any hurricane season, anytime there’s a remote possibility a hurricane might strike the island — I become very concerned,” she said. “Not just because of my family. The whole infrastructure of the island is so delicate, especially the power grid, and these storms are very strong.”
But the effects of Ernesto could go well beyond power outages, with severe flooding posing a major threat.
Rios-Berrios said her family lives in a town in the central mountains, and she feared landslides and flooding could block roads. She said she was regularly checking in with relatives while they had charged phones and available service.
“I did hear from them,” she said. “They’re without power.”
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