SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — About half of all homes and businesses on Puerto Rico were without power on Wednesday as Hurricane Ernesto churned north into the warm waters of the Atlantic after dumping torrential rain on the U.S. territory.
More than 725,000 homes and businesses on the island were without electric service out of a total of about 1.5 million customers, according to LUMA Energy, the Caribbean island’s main power supplier.
Juan Saca, LUMA’s president and chief executive, said he was unable to specify the extent of the damage to the system or how much time it would take to restore power. He said more than 1,500 Saca employees were working in the field.
“We are on the road to reestablish service,” Saca said. “We have to evaluate what needs to be done to be able to resolve it.”
Puerto Rico’s power grid is notoriously fragile. In 2022, Hurricane Fiona knocked out power for about 80% of the island’s homes and businesses for as long as a month. Five years earlier, Hurricanes Irma and Maria destroyed the island’s power grid and caused outages in some areas that lasted nearly a year.
Since Fiona, the U.S. Congress has approved $1 billion in funds to modernize and stabilize the grid in Puerto Rico.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Ernesto, which strengthened from a tropical storm to a Category 1 hurricane earlier in the day, was about 225 miles (365 km) northwest of the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan as it crawled to the northwest, packing winds of about 75 miles per hour (120 kph), the National Hurricane Center said.
The fifth named Atlantic storm of the season, Ernesto should approach the British island territory of Bermuda, about 665 miles (1,093 km) east of North Carolina, by Saturday, with rainfall beginning as early as Thursday, the NHC said. Ernesto could become a major hurricane in about 48 hours, it said.