Fiona's Fury, A Puerto Rican Utility Scandal And What's Next For Hurricane

Wreckage of a Puerto Rican home after Hurricane
Fiona. In a glimmer of reassurance, the sign
was written after the hurricane by the person
who lived there and translates to 
"I am alive."

Puerto Rico this morning is reeling from massive flash flooding and power outages thanks to Hurricane Fiona. The entire island of Puerto Rico was blacked out as Hurricane Fiona swept over the island Sunday.  

That was a function of both the fury of the storm and the scandal of a badly mismanaged power grid. 

Winds gusted past 100 mph in communities along the south shore of Puerto Rico, so you can understand why power would have failed there. On the northern end of the island, in places like San Juan, winds only gusted to 40 to 50 mph. 

In a normal world, those winds, combined with the severe flooding would have caused some outages. But the fact that everyone is blacked out is an infrastructure scandal and not entirely a hurricane disaster. 

As AccuWeather reports: 

"LUMA Energy, the private company that handles the transmission and distribution of electricity in Puerto Rico, stated that full restoration could take days 'due to the magnitude and scope of the blackout,' but the company has the necessary resources to respond to Fiona's effects on the grid."

Given LUMA's track record, and the power authorities in Puerto Rico before that, I'm not convinced. 

The Washington Post led with this story Monday:

"The hurricane winds that knocked out power to the entire island of Puerto Rico over the weekend encountered an electrical grid that experts liken to a house of cards: a fragile, decrepit, patchwork system running on old equipment that has failed to substantially modernize since the U.S. territory's deadliest storm, Hurricane Maria, swept through five years before."

A state-run utility that should manage electricity generation is bankrupt and negotiations to restructure a nasty $9 billion in debt is still mired in mediation and recrimination. Even before Fiona, power disruptions were increasing in Puerto Rico, suggesting incompetence or worse. 

Most of Puerto Rico's power is generated on the southern side of the island. Transmission lines run north through mountainous terrain, then on to the more heavily populated north. Storms in the remote mountains often disrupt these transmission lines. Puerto Rico ought to rethink its power grid, but that takes tons of money, which the territory clearly doesn't have, and imagination, which seems to be lacking, too. 

Hurricane Fiona is forecast to make a beeline for far
eastern Canada as a powerful storm over the weekend. 

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency has funded billions to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria, notes the Washington Post. A large share of that money was to go toward modernizing the electrical grid, but distribution of those funds have been slow to say the least.  

It'll be even slower now.  Rainfall on Puerto Rico was cataclysmic, with up to 33 inches of rain reported. Some of the flooding was even worse than what happened during Maria. 

Fiona moved on to trash eastern Dominican Republic with more wind and flood damage. It cruised through the eastern Turks and Caicos today after having gotten even stronger, with top winds of 115 mph.  

Forecasters predict the hurricane will continue northward, passing close to Bermuda as a powerful Category 4 storm. 

A strong cold front that will give us in Vermont a chilly end of the week will keep Fiona well off the U.S East Coast. However, chances are growing that Fiona, while transitioning to a powerful non-tropical storm, will blast eastern Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador over the weekend. 

Video: 

Summary from Inside Edition, either click on this link or click on image below:

An ABC News report, too: