'There will be power service interruptions': Puerto Rico braces for yet another storm

Puerto Rico is bracing for the arrival of a storm that could dump as much as 10 inches of rain in some parts of the disaster-stricken American territory this week.

Gov. Pedro Pierluisi mobilized the Puerto Rico National Guard on Monday ahead of the arrival of a system that is expected to strengthen into Tropical Storm Ernesto. The government also delayed the start of classes for public schools and froze prices for essential goods, while municipal mayors activated emergency plans.

Even though Ernesto is not expected to reach Puerto Rico as a full-fledged hurricane, the island’s officials urged residents to prepare for the peak of what experts and government agencies have said will be an extremely active Atlantic storm season.

“You can’t let your guard down. ...We are at the beginning of what is the peak of the season. We still have several weeks left,” said Nino Correa, who oversees the island’s Bureau for Emergency Management and Disaster Administration, at a press conference in the Governor’s mansion Monday morning. Several agency heads were in attendance and gave updates on storm preparations.

Puerto Rico is currently under a tropical storm warning. The National Hurricane Center has forecast that Ernesto will produce between three to six inches of rainfall on the island, with maximums of 10 inches. It could also potentially bring as much as six to eight inches of rain to parts of east and southern Puerto Rico that are flood-prone and low-lying. That includes the offshore slands of Culebra and Vieques. And it’s forecast to raise water levels by one to three feet above ground level from San Juan on the northern Atlantic Coast to Guayama on the southern Caribbean coast.

The system was 671 miles east-southeast of San Juan and moving quickly westward as of Monday at 2 pm, with maximum sustained winds of 35 miles per hour. Before reaching Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the potential tropical storm will bring heavy rains and gusts to the Windward Islands, which Hurricane Beryl devastated last month.

Juan Saca, who presides over LUMA Energy, the private company in charge of electricity distribution and transmission in Puerto Rico, said at the Monday press conference that there were over 1,000 workers and more than $200 million worth of supplies ready to respond to the storm, as well as contractors that can support the company’s operations. However, he admitted that outages would happen should tropical storm conditions occur, as the National Hurricane Center has forecast they will.

“It is important that we understand if we have 50-mile-per- hour winds, that will affect the system and will mean that there will be power service interruptions,” Saca said. “That’s a reality.”

Back-to-back natural disasters over the past decade have weakened Puerto Rico’s vulnerable power grid. In 2017, Hurricane Maria killed thousands and collapsed essential infrastructure, including the electrical system. Then in late 2019, earthquakes destroyed homes and schools on the southern half of the island. The sequence of quakes peaked with a magnitude 6.4 earthquake on the eve after Three Kings holiday, killing at least one and knocking out the island’s power. Less than three months later, former Gov. Wanda Vazquez enacted some of the strictest COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States as the coronavirus swept through.

Potential tropical storm Ernesto also comes after parts of the island, including San Juan, saw heavy rainfall over the weekend. However, San Juan-based National Weather Service meteorologist Lee-Ann Ingles-Serrano told the Miami Herald that while the previous rainfall could exacerbate the storm’s effects, the west of the island, which had seen the largest volumes of rainfall ahead of the storm, is not forecast to receive as much rainfall activity as the southeast.

Ingles-Serrano said that the southeast of the island and the municipalities of Vieques and Culebra will start getting heavy rains and storm winds beginning late Tuesday. Storm activity will begin across the island in the early morning Wednesday. Ocean conditions will also deteriorate, with surf that could reach as high as 15 feet.

On Monday, municipal brigades in the southeastern town of Yabucoa were cleaning up debris and trash in low-lying areas that are prone to flooding. Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico at Yabucoa in September 2017.

“We’re always the hurricane highway,” said Ahmed Molina, a municipal emergency official and special aide to the mayor in Yabucoa.

In 2022, Category 1 Hurricane Fiona overflowed Yabucoa’s creeks and rivers and many people had to be retrieved from flooded homes. Molina told the Herald that it doesn’t take much rain to overwhelm the municipality, where several rivers meet the Caribbean sea.

“With two inches we are practically flooding and the rivers are overflowing their channels,” he said.

José “Junito” Corcino Acevedo, the mayor of Vieques, a small municipality off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast, told the Herald that his town was also cleaning up streets and clearing debris. It was also coordinating with a local church to ensure that a food bank would be available to residents in need.

Hurricane Maria destroyed Vieques’ limited medical facilities in 2017, which means that its approximately 8,000 residents are forced to use an unreliable ferry system to reach Puerto Rico’s main island for life-saving medical treatments. The construction of a new hospital is under way, but many of its residents say that the delay in rebuilding has cost lives.

Corcino Acevedo said that Vieques recently unveiled a new alarm emergency system to communicate important announcements to residents quickly.

“Hopefully we don’t have to use it,” he said.

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