(20 Apr 2018) STORYLINE:
Puerto Ricans were on Wednesday coping with the aftermath of an island-wide blackout.
It happened after an excavator accidentally downed a transmission line, officials said, as the US territory struggles to repair an increasingly unstable power grid nearly seven months after Hurricane Maria.
On Thursday, small business owners were particularly hard hit, having to absorb not only the expense of lost revenue but, in some cases, a total loss of merchandise as well.
Puerto Rico's power company said that it has restored electricity to all customers affected by the blackout, but tens of thousands of families still remain without normal service seven months after hurricanes Maria and Irma.
Officials said that power had been restored to more than 1.4 million of its clients following Wednesday's blackout.
The outage marked the first time Puerto Rico was hit by an island-wide blackout since Hurricane Maria struck on Sept. 20 and wiped out as much as 75 percent of the power distribution lines.
"This is unacceptable and still I reaffirm that it is unacceptable", said Justo Gonzalez, Executive Sub-Director of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.
The blackout snarled traffic, forced businesses and schools to close and sparked long lines at gas stations.
Prior to the blackout on the US territory of 3.3 million people, more than 44,000 customers were still without normal electric service lost with Hurricane Maria.
Some have been without power even longer, hit when Hurricane Irma brushed past Puerto Rico's northeast coast as a Category 5 storm on Sept. 7, leaving 1 million customers without power,
It was the second major outage in less than a week, with the previous one affecting some 840,000 customers.
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