Posted on 10/04/2017 11:16:41 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
In the rural village of Salinas in southern Puerto Rico, frayed electric lines hanging from a utility pole blew in the breeze last week near the town square.
But the damage didn’t come from Hurricane Maria.
“Those wires were actually there before,” said Fermin Seda, 68, a Salinas resident who said he has grown accustomed to downed lines and power outages.
Two weeks after the storm plunged the island into a blackout, less than 10 percent of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million people have seen power restored - and many will wait months.
Restoring the grid after the worst storm to hit here in nine decades would be a monumental task even for a well-run utility. It will be much harder for the chronically underfunded Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), which went bankrupt in July amid mounting maintenance problems, years-long battles with creditors, a shrinking workforce and frequent management turnover.
Interviews with more than two dozen officials and consultants who work for or with the U.S. territory’s government, PREPA or its creditors reveal a utility that was unprepared for a major storm despite the ever-present risk to this Caribbean island. When Maria hit, PREPA was trying to simultaneously finance an operational overhaul and dig out from about $8 billion in debt.
Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello, in an interview with Reuters on Saturday, said none of the utility’s storm response plans could account for years of poor maintenance of the dilapidated electric network.
”The emergency plan was as follows: There is no way to fix the nature of the grid,” Rossello said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
PR’s mistake was to kick out the navy bombing range. It infused $300 million into the local economy which is now gone. Nothing replaced it. Unintended consequences of bad decisions.
****************
Also the tax incentives have been going away gradually since 2006...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.