Most of Puerto Rico is without power again, after Hurricane Fiona slammed the island on Sunday, and the worst may not be over. Fiona already produced widespread flooding in Puerto Rico, and continued to pour rain down as the storm continued on to the Dominican Republic, with up to 30 inches total possible in eastern and southern areas of Puerto Rico, including several inches on Monday.
Power had been restored to around 100,000 customers, but more than 1.3 million were still without power as of this writing. It took 11 months for power to be restored to all areas after Hurricane Maria five years ago—Fiona arrived just two days before Maria’s fifth anniversary—but blackouts and brownouts remained frequent. With Fiona approaching, Sergio Marxuach, policy director at the Center for a New Economy, told NBC News, “Our grid may be functional, but it’s fragile.” He added, “Five years later, we are still exposed to the same risk.”
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“The damages that we are seeing are catastrophic,” said Gov. Pedro Pierluisi. That includes landslides and at least one bridge washed out. Sunday evening, Pierluisi told reporters that power would be fully restored in a “matter of days.”
According to Lee-Ann Ingles-Serrano, a National Weather Service meteorologist in San Juan, “we are still expecting flash flooding at least for the rest of the day today, and that might be extended for the next day.”
Puerto Rico suffered enormously following Hurricane Maria, with at least 2,975 people dying, many due to the electrical outages. Donald Trump’s response to the disaster was famously horrible and callous, clearly showing that he didn’t consider Puerto Ricans to be real Americans.
President Joe Biden declared an emergency on Sunday, ordering the Federal Emergency Management Agency to “coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, and to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in all 78 municipalities in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.”
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