A storm’s never destroyed a grid like Maria ruined Puerto Rico’s

Bloomberg

You don’t even have to leave the airport to see that Hurricane Maria has laid waste to Puerto Rico’s power grid.
The San Juan airport was abandoned. No electricity meant no air conditioning, and no air conditioning meant hot and muggy air wafting through the terminals. Ceilings were leaking. Floors were wet. Only the military, relying on its own sight and radar systems, was landing planes.
The airport is one of the first places crews will restore power—whenever they can get to it.
Hundreds are still waiting for the all-clear to move in and start the arduous task of resurrecting Puerto Rico’s grid.
The devastation that Maria exacted on Puerto Rico’s aging and grossly neglected electricity system when it slammed ashore as a Category 4 storm two days ago is unprecedented—not just for the island but for all of the US. One hundred percent of the system run by the Puerto Rico Power Authority is offline, because Maria damaged every part of it. The territory is facing weeks, if not months, without service as utility workers repair power plants and lines that were already falling apart.
“I have seen a lot damage in the 32 years that I have been in this business, and from this particular perspective, it’s about as large a scale damage as I have ever seen,” said Wendul G. Hagler II, a brigadier general in the National Guard, which is assisting in the response. No federal agency dared to estimate how long it’ll take to re-energise Puerto Rico.
If it’s any indication of how far they’ve gotten, the island’s power authority known as Prepa is only now starting to assess the damage. “We are only a couple of days in from the storm—there could be lots of issues and confusion at the beginning of something like this,” said Kenneth Buell, a director at the US Energy Department.
“We are in the phase where we have people queued up and lining up resources.”
Rebuilding the island’s grid into something more robust will cost billions of dollars, Buell said.