In Puerto Rico, No Power Means No Telecommunications

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Maria tore through the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is still mostly an island deleted from the present and pushed back a century or so—with little clean water, little electric power, and almost no telecommunications. For telecom, the biggest problem is the lack of power, because most of the island’s transmission lines were knocked out.

“We have to reconstruct the power grid as if we were dropping into the middle of the desert and starting from scratch,” says Luis Romero, vice president of the Puerto Rico Telecommunications Alliance. “Then on top of that would go the telecommunications services.” Puerto Rico’s telecom carriers, who are fiercely competitive, have banded together “to provide communication to people in despair,” Romero says. “But basically we’re on our own here.” And no one knows what’ll happen when the diesel that’s keeping all those generators humming runs out.