An island-wide blackout hit Puerto Rico on Wednesday as the island struggles to repair an increasingly unstable power grid, just seven months after Hurricane Maria. Officials said an excavator accidentally downed a transmission line. Officials said it could take 24 to 36 hours to fully restore power to more than 1.4 million customers as outrage grew across the island about the state of Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority. It is the second major outage in less than a week, with the previous one affecting some 840,000 customers. Several large power outages have hit Puerto Rico in recent months, but Wednesday was the first time since the Category 4 storm struck on Sept. 20 that the U.S. territory has experienced a full island-wide blackout. Officials reported no cancellations or delays at major airports due to the use of generators. They said restoring power to hospitals, airports, banking centers and water pumping systems was the priority, following that would be businesses and then homes.
