![]() Others were poisoned or killed by breathing the fumes of their portable generators. So, this hurricane weekend, some people were burned or killed when trying to operate their own generators. Since LUMA constantly fails to deliver electricity, many people buy portable generators to power their lights and refrigerators. For customers, unexpected outages can damage equipment, even those essential for hospitals and businesses. Plus, LUMA implements outages, which are not even included in such calculations. ![]() More recently, under LUMA, the average time to restore power to Puerto Ricans became grotesquely worse at 5.4 hours. However, In Puerto Rico, operating under its old power authority, the time to restore power to customers used to be far worse at 2.5 hours. ![]() On the mainland United States, whenever there is a blackout the average time to restore electricity is one hour and 20 minutes. However, LUMA Energy - the privatized electric company tasked with improving the island’s energy reliability -failed to deliver electricity to 100 percent of the population: all 3 million people. Now, five years later, with Hurricane Fiona, there was no such collapse of tens of thousands of utility poles, since Fiona was only a Category 1 storm. Even after four months, roughly 450,000 households still had no electricity. One month after Maria, 88 percent of the island remained without electrical power. Hurricane Maria caused the utter collapse of Puerto Rico’s power grid and the worst electrical blackout ever in the United States - one of the longest blackouts in the history of our planet. That’s because Maria struck Puerto Rico as a high-end Category 4 hurricane, with winds reaching 155 miles per hour: It was the most intense tropical cyclone worldwide that year, knocking down or severely damaging more than 45,000 utility poles (as high as 90 feet tall) and 6,500 miles of electrical cables. By no means do I expect that the outages of electricity caused by Hurricane Fiona will be as gruesome as those caused by Hurricane Maria. As the rainwater reached down to a river in San Lorenzo its water level grew by 30 feet in some points and wrecked the concrete Bridge of La Marina, which had withstood every disaster since it was built in 1918. There and elsewhere, countless ripe coffee beans were washed away. I was there, just one day prior, at the Hacienda Muñoz coffee plantation. So, San Lorenzo alone, consisting of 53 square miles, was pummeled by billions of gallons of water. To explain, bear in mind that just one inch of rainwater consists of 17.38 million gallons per square mile. For example, the municipality of San Lorenzo was flooded with 29 inches. The cumulative rainwater varied by location, ranging from 5 inches to a disastrous 35 inches of rainwater. Plantations of various crops were wiped out: 90 percent of plantain and bananas were destroyed. Throughout the island, the damages to agriculture are enormous. Roughly 1,200 people are still in shelters. More than 1,000 people have been evacuated or rescued by emergency personnel. But unlike Hurricane Maria, five years ago, the main crises caused presently by Hurricane Fiona pertain not to destructive winds but to floods. Consider nature first: While Fiona was considered a Category 1 hurricane, winds whipped trees and buildings with speeds of up to 103 miles per hour when it hit Puerto Rico, according to the National Weather Service.
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