Unlike Texas and Florida, which were hit by hurricanes that knocked out power grids this summer, workers from other utilities can’t hop in a truck and drive to Puerto Rico. The main airport in San Juan is not yet operating normally, which is slowing the airlift of crews, generators and other equipment.
It’s too early to estimate the total bill, but Prepa said even before Maria that it needed more than $4 billion to upgrade its infrastructure. Years of under-investment had left it with an inefficient and unreliable system. Its fleet of power plants has a median age of 44 years, for example. The average age across the United States is 18 years.
Prepa already had more than $9 billion in debt when it filed for what’s essentially bankruptcy protection in July. It was weakened by the island’s long recession, which sapped demand for electricity, but it also struggled to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid bills.
COULD WE SEE THIS COMING?
Last year, 10 months before Maria smashed into the island, consultants hired by the Puerto Rico Energy Commission wrote a scathing report about Prepa. They said reliability was poor - outages occurred four or five times more often than at mainland U.S. utilities - because of a history of neglecting maintenance.
“It is difficult to overstate the level of disrepair or operational neglect at PREPA’s generation facilities,” wrote consultants from Synapse Energy Economics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They said that frequently there were “simple failures that blossom into crises.”
The utility blamed more than one-third of the outages on failure to keep tree limbs pruned around power lines.
http://www.wpxi.com/news/puerto-rico-remains-dark-as-damage-assessments-begin/614718918
IN short, as Trump points out, you have a democratic elected legislature that for years has sucked off the USA. Instead of living inland and beefing up things, they don’t.
ONce again, Trump is right.