A lot of detail and amazing info in the following article:
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060079499...First, Irma sideswiped the island on Sept. 6, knocking out power to almost a million customers. It was the worst storm-related outage to hit Puerto Rico in almost two decades.
Then, two weeks later to the day, Maria howled onshore at 155 mph. Its eye crossed almost the entire island, from southeast to northwest, and was the strongest storm to rake the island in almost a century.
PREPA was still restoring power to hundreds of thousands of customers knocked out by Irma when Maria hit and caused a systemwide collapse.
"If you fly over the island, it's not just the power grid, it's the whole infrastructure," Torres said in an interview at his office in San Juan last month. "The roads, the water system was down, homes."
The only way to take it in was by helicopter. Roads were buried in landslides; bridges had been swept away. Two-thirds of electrical substations were flooded or heavily damaged. Same for the switchyards. Power plants, many on the coast, had been flooded by surging seas, and wind had battered cooling towers and turbines....
...A mainland hurricane of terrific force, like Katrina, might damage 20 percent of transmission towers. Maria was the reverse. Only 20 percent were functioning, and many of the 80 percent damaged had fallen from wind or foundered in mudslides.
"Let me tell you, in 21 years in the electric utility industry, and the whole time in emergency response roles, Puerto Rico was definitely the worst I've ever seen," said Mike Menges, head of business continuity and operations for the Edison Electric Institute, who was an early responder to Puerto Rico.
"It was a rebuild, not a restoration," he said....
