Puerto Rico's fragile power grid and a haphazard backup system leave the island’s water system prone to collapse.
Five years later, the island’s electrical systemdespite an even larger infusion of Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to repair the grid and make it more resilient against future storms. To keep water running, officials must ensure there is a backup power source when the lights go out.
The lack of sufficient backup power on an island notorious for going dark even during mild summer rainstorms can be tied to decisions by Puerto Rican officials as well as a cumbersome process for federal funding through FEMA and HUD. The failures shed light on why, despite enormous federal funding, water and other essential services in Puerto Rico are still prone to collapse.
The end result is that the island’s water system remains so unreliable that many communities are left to fend for themselves.responsibility for keeping pumps running shifted from the water authority to ill-equipped municipal leaders who scrambled to find generators and supply cistern trucks with a dwindling supply of diesel, according to more than 30 mayors interviewed for this report.
After the power grid was patched back together, the federal agency took the generators back, but they set aside billions of federal dollars for so that next time the island could recover on its own.Public records show PRASA submitted a $50 million request in 2020 to purchase generators through HUD but that the island’s Housing Department, which administers the federal funds, rejected it. Housing Department officials declined to say why the funds were not approved.
PRASA could point to just one project FEMA greenlit to install specially designed generators at the La Plata Lake Dam facility, which supplies nearly 400,000 customers, data shows. Work on the initiative won’t begin until at least 2024, the water utility said. Between June 1 and Nov. 30, 2022, PRASA agreed to pay more than $670,000 monthly to hold 235 units in reserve, contract records show. Once PRASA needed them, the firms would charge a rental fee two to three times the reserve fee.
Asked why the agency didn’t position more generators in advance, Pagán said she thought the island’s electrical grid would hold“Well, one always expects the system will work and we would have electricity,” she said. “That wasn’t the case.”the island archipelago, PRASA was again forced to solicit 383 generators from FEMA. Nine days after the storm struck, only 13 had arrived — and thousands of people across the island were still without potable water.
Mayors of towns throughout Puerto Rico described similar experiences in Fiona’s aftermath: The water authority failed to provide sufficient generator power for local water facilities and also deployed an insufficient number of potable water trucks. Not only were generators and trucks missing or inoperable, mayors said, but the administration struggled to get the diesel fuel it had reserved to its existing fleet during the period of powerlessness.
Similar stories played out in at least 10 other largely mountainous communities where mayors had to search for generators after the storm. When diesel became scarce, more than a dozen had to buy and provide fuel for them, too. “But at the moment of truth …” he trailed off. In one neighborhood, the mayor said, residents and municipal employees repaired the motor of one of the utility’s generators themselves to get it working.The neighbors in Cuchillas went nearly as long without water after Fiona as they did five years earlier, when Maria struck.
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