XPost: soc.culture.puerto-rico, alt.global-warming, sac.politics   
   XPost: soc.retirement   
   From: dharris@splcenter.org   
      
   One tree was all it took. Around 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, a   
   wayward trunk tumbled over onto a major transmission line in   
   Puerto Rico’s still-fragile electrical grid and cut power to   
   roughly 840,000 customers, affecting more than half of the   
   island’s population.   
      
   Officials from the island’s electric utility company – PREPA —   
   said the accident occurred in the region of Cayey, where crews   
   were working to restore power to people still waiting nearly   
   seven months after Hurricane Maria. Increasingly, that work   
   requires clearing away heavily forested mountainsides to gain   
   access to the large utility poles that carry transmission lines   
   from one mountain peak to the next.   
      
   It was during that kind of work that a tree falling toward the   
   ground made contact with the power line instead. One worker,   
   employed by a PREPA subcontractor, was hospitalized with burns   
   to his hands, though officials said he was in stable condition.   
      
   It would seem remarkable that a single tree could plunge more   
   than half of the commonwealth’s population into darkness. But it   
   was so, and PREPA even tweeted a picture of the tree. Karla   
   Iglesias, an engineer who has worked on Puerto Rico’s electrical   
   grid, said it has everything to do with the fact that the line   
   the tree made contact with – known as line 50900 — connects two   
   of the island’s main power plants, Palo Seco and Aguirre.   
      
   “This line was coming out of one generation plant and connecting   
   to another generation plant. So when the tree hits that line,   
   it’s going to interrupt a major flow of current,” Iglesias said.   
   “Imagine that you have those Christmas lights. If you break the   
   first one, the rest aren’t going to work. It’s going to break   
   the circuit.”   
      
   PREPA officials said they were working to restore power as   
   quickly as possible, and some communities had already come back   
   online by late afternoon. But officials said full restoration   
   could take as long as 11 hours.   
      
   In some places that have had their power back for months, like   
   the capital, San Juan, the outage was a humbling reminder that   
   the restoration is not yet complete in more remote parts of the   
   island, and that one mistake still has the ability to ripple   
   back to the island’s most populated centers. In places that only   
   recently got their power back, the outage was a frustrating, if   
   not totally surprising, setback.   
      
   “When you went five-plus months without power,” tweeted Jozyel   
   Manuel Rivera, “a few more hours or a day isn’t going to kill   
   you.”   
      
   https://whyy.org/npr_story_post/a-tree-falls-in-puerto-rico-and-   
   840000-customers-lose-power/   
      
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