Most of Puerto Rico hit by New Year’s Eve power outage

San Juan, Puerto Rico — A massive power outage hit nearly all of Puerto Rico early Tuesday as the U.S. territory prepared to celebrate New Year’s Eve. More than 1.2 million out of 1.47 million clients were without power, according to Luma Energy, a private company that oversees electricity transmission and distribution on the island.

Luma said in a statement early Tuesday it would likely take between 24 and 48 hours to restore electricity across the island, “conditions permitting,” but a couple hours later it said service had been restored to in some areas. A company spokesman told CBS News that nearly 200,000 customers had power as of late afternoon.

The company said a medical center and the Municipal Hospital of San Juan were up and running again, and that it would provide further updates on the restoration of service across the island every couple hours.

Luma Energy spokesperson Hugo Sorrentini told CBS News the blackout was caused by a failure in one of the electric lines located on one of the main power plants called Costa Sur. The failure in the line caused the power plant to go out of service and then “created a waterfall effect in the system,” he said, that led to the other power plants in the island to go out of service.

A full investigation on what happened to the electric line is underway, Sorrentini said. 

Facilities including hospitals and water and sewer authority facilities are “energized” as of 3 p.m., Luma said in an update on social media. 

Reuters quoted Ivan Baez, a spokesperson for Puerto Rico’s primary energy generator Genera, as saying the failure of the grid was believed to have been caused by a problem with a line operated by Luma, but that it had also brought down plants belonging to Genera and some other private electricity generators.

Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said in a post on social media that his administration was communicating with both Luma and Genera “regarding the massive blackout affecting a large part of the Island due to a critical fault.”

He said work was underway to restore electrical supply and that the government was “demanding answers and solutions from both Luma and Genera, who must expedite the restart of the generating units outside the fault area and keep the people duly informed about the measures they are taking to restore service throughout the Island.”

Speaking to the Telemundo network late Monday, however, Josué Colón, head of Puerto Rico’s electric energy authority, said it could take several days to fully restore service.

Puerto Rico continues to struggle with chronic power outages blamed on a crumbling power grid that was razed by Hurricane Maria, a powerful category 4 storm that struck the island in September 2017. The system was already in decline prior to the storm given years of lack of maintenance and investment.

In a message posted Tuesday on social media, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose state has one of the biggest populations of Puerto Ricans in the continental U.S., said residents of the territory had been “treated as second class citizens for far too long.”

“The fact that, as Americans, they don’t have a reliable electric grid and suffer sporadic blackouts on a continuous basis is indefensible and would not be tolerated anywhere else in the United States,” said Cuomo. “The federal government must finally acknowledge its responsibility to Puerto Rico and provide the resources and expertise necessary to end this cycle of insanity once and for all.”

contributed to this report.