Fiona Leaves One Million People without Power

Hurricane Fiona is a major storm with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour (215 kilometers per hour) moving toward Bermuda and eastern Canada. At least eight people died in the storm.

Five years ago Hurricane Maria knocked out all power to the island in 2017. Now, Fiona devastated Puerto Rico.

Poweroutages.com calculates outages based on utility data. According to limited information from LUMA Energy, which operates the Puerto Rico grid, early Thursday, 1.033M customers were without service.

There were approximately 1.168M without power early Wednesday out of 1.468M entire customers, as stated by Poweroutages.com.

That solution came much sooner than after Maria when nearly all 1.5M customers were without power for a week while the now-bankrupt Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) still ran the grid.

It took PREPA about 11 months to restore power to all customers, but Maria was a stronger storm than Fiona.

Restoration Ongoing

Maria struck Puerto Rico as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 155 mph, while Fiona smashed as a Category 1 storm with winds of 85 mph.

LUMA Energy stated it had restored service to almost 376,000 customers late Wednesday. Moreover, LUMA has expressed full repair could require several days.

LUMA is a joint venture owned by Canadian energy company ATCO Ltd (50%) and US energy supplier Quanta Services Inc (NYSE: PWR ) (50%).

LUMA won the network management contract in 2020 and started operating the system in 2021. Still, PREPA owns most of Puerto Rico’s electrical infrastructure.