On New Year’s Eve, when a major blackout hit the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico and left nearly the entire island without power, Connecticut residents with ties to the island were ready to host relatives in need.
“I had an aunt who, had there been an extended period of time without any energy, they were really considering to come back to Connecticut, staying with family until things got situated,” said state Rep. Christopher Rosario, a Bridgeport Democrat and former chair of the Legislative Black and Puerto Rican Caucus.
Nearly 90% of 1.47 million clients across Puerto Rico were left in the dark, according to Luma Energy, a private company that oversees electricity transmission and distribution. Power was restored the next day, but the outage ignited calls for accountability from the island’s newly elected governor and others.
In Connecticut, the state with the highest Puerto Rican population per capita in the nation, members of the diaspora reacted with frustration and stress.
For Charles Venator-Santiago, an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and director of UConn’s Puerto Rican Studies Initiative, the latest power failure was a “headache.”
“The biggest danger on the island is mostly the people who have medical needs – oxygen machines or dialysis machines or insulin, for example,” Venator-Santiago said. “So that’s always creating stress for a large section of the diaspora. And this is a normal occurrence.”
Grid still recovering after Hurricane Maria
Puerto Rico’s power grid has been plagued with problems for years. Recently, high temperatures in June led to hundreds of thousands of island residents going without power. Then, in August, Hurricane Ernesto knocked out power to more than half of the island.
While island-wide blackouts are rare in Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory struggles with chronic power outages blamed on a crumbling power grid that was razed by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm in September 2017. Thousands evacuated to Connecticut due to the storm and lingering damage.
The power system, however, was already in decline after years of lack of maintenance and investment.
Only recently did crews start making permanent repairs to Puerto Rico’s power grid following Hurricane Maria. The island continues to depend on generators provided by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency to help stabilize the grid.
Constant power outages a 'push factor' for migration
Venator-Santiago said the Puerto Rican population is split, with roughly two-thirds living on the mainland U.S. and a third still on the island. He said frequent power outages are a “push factor” for more of that third to leave Puerto Rico.
“What we might see is people just throwing in the towel, giving up and saying, ‘I want to leave. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m heading to Hartford, or elsewhere,’” Venator-Santiago said.
Venator-Santiago said the constant power issues also discourage investment in the island.
“What this continues to do is send a message to business and to investors that Puerto Rico is not a reliable place to develop a local economy or invest because you can’t have reliable energy,” he said.
Rosario, the state representative, said he’s planning on introducing legislation in Hartford this year to create a Connecticut-Puerto Rico Trade Commission. Among its charges would be encouraging Connecticut’s representatives in Washington to seek a solution for the territory’s power woes.
“That’s going to be one of the things that they’re going to talk about: encouraging our federal delegation to really, really push on Luma, the local energy company, to make sure that they keep up their commitment to expand the energy grid,” Rosario said.
Rosario said the commission would also encourage the state to send help during times of crisis via the National Guard and crews from Eversource.
“In New York, my colleagues always say that Puerto Rico is almost like the sixth borough,” Rosario said. “I almost feel like Puerto Rico’s kind of like our extra county.”
“There's a lot of back and forth between Connecticut and Puerto Rico,” Rosario said. “We want to make sure that we keep those ties going. It's almost like another neighborhood to us.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
