Puerto Rico hurricane season starts today. 11,000 Puerto Ricans are still without power

Restoring power to island will take another two months, officials say

Partially destroyed houses are seen six months after Hurricane Maria affected Puerto Rico in Fajardo (RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP/Getty Images)

Hurricane season has officially begun in Puerto Rico, where some 11,000 people remain without power after Hurricane Maria storm hit the island nearly eight months ago.

Officials said it could take another two months to fully restore power to Puerto Rico’s 3.3m residents, extending what is already the longest blackout in US history. Still others warned that the repairs to the power grid completed after the Category 4 storm would not hold through another hurricane.

“The grid is there, but the grid isn’t there. It’s teetering,” said Hector Pesquera, Puerto Rico’s commissioner of public safety. Even if the next storm is a Category 1, he added, the power grid is "in such a state that I think we’re going to lose power”.

The latest report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) said there was a 75 per cent likelihood of five to nine hurricanes occurring in the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, which stretches from 1 June to the end of November. There is a 70 per cent chance that as many as four of those could be Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricanes, according to the association.

To prepare for this likelihood, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has left some 600 generators on the island – more than six times the number stationed there before Maria hit. The agency has also stockpiled 5.4m liters of water and more than 80,000 tarps in preparation for the next storm. Officials have told residents to stockpile enough emergency supplies to live as long as 10 days without help.

Meanwhile, government agencies are pouring billions of dollars into fixing the existing power structure and creating a new, more efficient one. Walter Higgins, the new CEO of Puerto Rico's Electric Power Authority, said the agency just awarded a $500m contract to MasTec to help with power restoration and the construction of a new grid. Cobra Energy received another $900m contract, and a third was being finalised.

The restoration effort has cost $3.8bn in federal funding so far. But one power authority worker said that 10 to 15 per cent of that work was not up to standard.

“The logistics were terrible. I give it an F,” said Fredyson Martinez, vice president of the power authority workers’ union. “Things need to be fixed.”

The news came on the heels of a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found the death toll from Hurricane Maria could be as much as 70 times higher than official estimates. Harvard researchers said more than 4,600 people likely died in the storm – significantly more than the government’s estimate of 64.

President Donald Trump previously gave his administration's response to the hurricane a "10 out of 10," comparing it to a "real catastrophe" like Hurricane Katrina, which killed an estimated 1,833 people.

Responding to the new death toll on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president took the situation in Puerto Rico "extremely seriously".

"The two Category 4 hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico were historic, and we've responded with the largest FEMA operation in history," she said. "And we're going to continue to work with the people of Puerto Rico and do everything we can to be helpful."

Mr Trump has yet to comment on the study,

The Associated Press contributed to this report.