Islandwide blackout hits Puerto Rico as residents prepare for Easter weekend

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — An islandwide blackout hit Puerto Rico on Wednesday as the largely Catholic residents of the US territory prepared to celebrate the Easter weekend, a power company spokesman said.

All 1.4 million clients on the island were without power, Hugo Sorrentini, spokesman for Luma Energy, which oversees the transmission and distribution of power, told The Associated Press. "The entire island is without generation," he said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the shutdown, the latest in a string of major blackouts on the island in recent years. Governor Jenniffer González, who was travelling, said officials were "working diligently" to address the outage.

Dozens of people were forced to walk next to the rails of the rapid transit system that serves the capital, San Juan, while scores of businesses including the biggest mall in the Caribbean were forced to close. Professional baseball and basketball games were cancelled as the hum of generators and smell of smoke filled the air.

The last island-wide blackout occurred on New Year's Eve. Puerto Rico has struggled with chronic outages since September 2017 when Hurricane Maria pummelled the island as a powerful Category 4 storm, razing a power grid that crews are still struggling to rebuild.

The grid already had been deteriorating as a result of decades of a lack of maintenance and investment.

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