Wednesday, January 1

Happy New Year! Here's our first daily update of 2025!

Over 50% of Puerto Rico is still out of power after a major power grid failure occurred on New Year's Eve.

LUMA Energy, the company managing the power supply of Puerto Rico, reported a power grid failure at around 5:30 am local time on the morning of New Year's Eve. They suspect that it was due to an issue with an underground power line, and they told residents that it would take one to two days to fix. The effects were severe-- over 90% of Puerto Rican customers were out of power as one of the biggest nights of the year rapidly approached.

LUMA Energy is the primary energy distributor for Puerto Rico-- they took over from the government's Puerto Rico electric power authority in 2021. Meanwhile, another company by the name of Genera supplies the power

LUMA sent out crews to fix the issue and improved the outage numbers to around 50%, but that number remained for the night-- around half of Puerto Ricans had to spend the transition of the New Year in darkness, leading to frustration among citizens. Thankfully, crucial services like water treatment and hospitals were the first to regain electricity.

Unfortunately, power grid problems are a consistent issue in Puerto Rico, where much of the infrastructure is old and crumbling. The island's fragile power lines have long needed repair, but they are left in their tattered states. Due to its location in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is frequently hit by hurricanes, which further damage its brittle power grid.

In 2017, Hurricane Irma brushed Puerto Rico with strong winds, causing serious damage. Just two weeks later, Hurricane Maria slammed into the island with heavy rain, storm surge, and winds of over 155 mph, crippling their power grid and killing 2,975 people. By three months after the hurricane, 45% of customers were still without power, and another 14% of citizens remained without tap water.

Locals say that Puerto Rico is still recovering from Maria, and additional weather events have slowed down that process. Several hurricanes and tropical storms pass or make landfall on Puerto Rico each year, each of which brings heavy rain that causes flooding and more power outages. In addition, even before Maria hit, their grid was in bad shape after years of carelessness on the government's part.

However, they are slowly making progress. As more and more storms hit, Puerto Rico discovers the weak points in their power grid, and the system is improving. While many citizens are extremely frustrated with the island's poor infrastructure, reconstructing and renovating takes time, effort, and money. Puerto Ricans, though, are angry with the lack of effort that the government seems to be putting into solving this issue, which they believe is the reason why it is taking so long to recover.

Fact of the Day: One bottle of wine is usually made up of around 600-800 grapes.

Quote of the Day: Holding on is believing that there's only a past; letting go is knowing that there's a future. (Daphne Rose Kingma)

Word of the Day (Merriam-Webster): Zeitgeist (noun, TSYTE-gyste) - Zeitgeist refers to the general beliefs, ideas, and spirit of a time and place.

In a Sentence: The artist’s songs perfectly captured the zeitgeist of 1990s America.