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Puerto Rico official says island's grid unprepared for hurricane season

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Puerto Rico official says island's grid unprepared for hurricane season

Most of Puerto Rico has its power back in the wake of Hurricane Maria, but the island is unprepared for another major storm, Puerto Rico's power restoration coordinator said June 5.

That grim assessment comes as roughly 9,700 customers in Puerto Rico remain without electricity over eight months after the Category 5 hurricane swept through, initially leaving nearly the entire island in the dark. Despite getting help with emergency energy restoration from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, contractors and other utilities, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority has yet to perform a more permanent upgrade to its old and battered power system, leaving Puerto Rico vulnerable to another big storm.

"They are aware that the [2018] hurricane season is already upon them ... but they're not ready," Puerto Rico power restoration coordinator Carlos Torres said at the Edison Electric Institute's annual convention in San Diego.

In November 2017, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló appointed Torres to his current position, with the goal of making him the "single point of contact" for rehabilitation efforts on the island.

Torres told EEI conference attendees that Rosselló has required PREPA to update its preparedness plans and that the utility performed table-top exercises to test how it would respond to another big hurricane. Although he was not present for the exercises, Torres said U.S. Department of Energy reports on the drills indicated PREPA was unprepared for another big storm.

"No, they're not ready for the hurricane season," Torres said. "They're going to be challenged."

On June 5, PREPA said about 1.4 million, or 99.34%, of its customers now have power, with 9,674 still awaiting service. The Federal Emergency Management Agency largely wound down the Corps' mission assignment in Puerto Rico on May 18 even though many thousands still were in the dark.

FEMA has taken heat, including from U.S. lawmakers, for not doing more to aid PREPA's longer-term grid modernization. But under the Stafford Act, the agency is limited to helping restore infrastructure only to pre-storm conditions as long as the systems meet current codes.

"My response to Congress was simply this: You make the law. We implement it. You don't like it, you can change it," Ahsha Tribble, deputy regional administrator of FEMA's ninth region, said at the EEI conference. "It's very painful I think for all of us … to know that we're throwing it back up, to know we're back in hurricane season again [and] a strong wind and a heavy rain could take down the system in many places again."

PREPA's recovery has been hobbled by its financial woes — the public utility launched bankruptcy proceedings in 2017. Those difficulties partly drove PREPA in January to announce a plan to privatize its generation assets and lease parts of its transmission system.