U.S. Pulls Puerto Rico Backup Power Before Hurricane Season Peak
- One backup plant being dismantled, two others remain running
- Heart of Atlantic hurricane season will strike in mid-August
A worker fixes power lines in the town of Limones, Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on May 18, 2018.
Photographer: Xavier Garcia/BloombergJust a month into the Atlantic hurricane season, Puerto Rico -- which saw its entire power grid collapse when storms slammed into the U.S. territory last year -- is about to lose some of its back-up power generation.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been responsible for leasing three “mega,” back-up power plants in Puerto Rico as it recovered from hurricanes Irma and Maria that took out power to about a million households there last year. Now that service has been restored, the agency is canceling a contract for one of those generators, at Yabucoa, in eight days. The other two at Palo Seco are running on a one-month contract extension, Puerto Rico’s utility said.