Ever since Hurricane Maria ravished Puerto Rico in 2017, the residents of the island has continued to encounter power outages, which are affecting thousands. Issues of corruption along with inability to supply the total island with power plagued the utility company that initially had the responsibility of dealing with the issue. Luma Energy, a private company that took over power transmission and distribution in Puerto Rico on June 1^st has struggled with widespread outages and growing discontent among the population. Luma is a consortium consisting of utilities including Calgary, Alberta-based Atco and Quanta Services Inc. of Houston. It serves about 1.5 million customers as part of a 15-year contract with the Puerto Rican government that owns and operates the power grid on the island.

Recently, a fire at a main substation in the capital San Juan has compounded the problem. Not counting the fire at the main substation, officials admit that outages have affected more than 1 million customers.

A sudden power failure left more than 337,000 customers in the dark throughout the island on Wednesday June 9th. Three transmission units were knocked offline for reasons that the utility hasn’t been able to determine. As a result of the outages, thousands of people have had to throw out spoiled food and medicines including insulin. Many also complained of damaged appliances as lights flickered on and off since Thursday, June 10^th outages plunged 900,000 people into darkness.

The latest outages came just hours after Luma cautioned customers that service would be interrupted nightly for a few days due to a pre-schedule maintenance activity at one plant.

The problems experienced by Luma are due to aging infrastructure and a fragile power grid that has not been fortified since Hurricane Maria. The hurricane causes much of the Puerto Rican population to suffer without power for up to a year.

The outages have been so pervasive lately that several mayors of cities throughout Puerto Rico have declared states of emergency and distributed generators and ice to the most in need. Private crews have also been hired to restore power after Luma said that it didn’t have enough workers to respond to the problem.

On Tuesday, Luma released a statement asking municipal officials and private contractors to cease trying to repair the system independently. The company argued that the effort was illegal and dangerous.

Many of the residents of Puerto Rico were confident that the power issues would be repaired when Luma took control. However, they now say that things have gotten worse since its involvement.