Hurricane Fiona: Puerto Rico Goes Dark 5 Years After Maria Devastated Grid

Puerto Rico has lost all power due to an approaching storm, almost five years to the day that Hurricane Maria ravaged the island's power grid.

Early Sunday morning, around 3 a.m. local time, Tropical Storm Fiona increased in strength and was officially upgraded to a hurricane as it made landfall in Puerto Rico. Only a few minutes before it fully arrived at the U.S. territory, the website PowerOutage.us reported that the increasingly powerful storm had knocked out power to every home on the island.

"Puerto Rico is 100% without power due to a transmission grid failure from Hurricane Fiona," the site stated.

The blackout came only two days prior to the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria making landfall in Puerto Rico and proceeding to wreak havoc on its power grid. In addition to severe flooding and destruction of infrastructure, the hurricane caused a power outage that stretched on for months, making it the longest power outage in U.S. history, the severity of which was exacerbated by slow relief efforts from the U.S. government. Additionally, the handling of Puerto Rico in the wake of Maria became one of the biggest scandals of the first year of the Trump administration.

Maria's damage was estimated at $91.6 billion, which is the third-costliest hurricane on record.

Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi confirmed the outage in a Twitter post on Sunday and assured residents that protocols were being enacted to bring power back online. Abner Gomez, head of public safety and crisis management at Puerto Rico's LUMA Energy, also issued a statement saying that the company was working with local government agencies to restore power and that this latest blackout would not be a repeat of 2017.

"This is not Maria, this hurricane will not be Maria," Gomez said.

In a tweet, the official LUMA Energy public relations Twitter account estimated that, due to the scope of Hurricane Fiona, repairs to the power grid might take "several days."

"Due to the magnitude and scope of the outage, as well as the effects of Hurricane Fiona, full power restoration could take several days," the tweet reads when translated by Google. "We have the equipment, tools, and resources to respond to this event."

Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli lamented in his tweet that, even five years after the devastation of Maria, the Puerto Rican power grid is still not strong enough to withstand storms like Fiona. This latest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico is considerably less powerful than Maria, which managed to reach Category 5 strength.

Newsweek reached out to LUMA Energy for comment.