Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said the blackout in Puerto Rico was “tragically predictable,” calling out the fact that most of FEMA’s $9.4 billion funding is earmarked for more fossil fuel infrastructure. “We must break the vicious cycle.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the power outages in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Fiona was “tragically predictable” and could have been mitigated with sustainability measures that she and climate advocates have promoted.the entire electrical grid for over 1.4 million customers in the U.S. territory on Sunday before the hurricane made landfall, five years after Hurricane Maria similarly caused an island-wide blackout that took nearly a year to fix.
The island’s energy grid has gone through many changes over the past years, with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority , which oversaw the energy grid before Luma took over, running into $9 billion of debt.into programs to restore the energy projects, but lawmakers — including Ocasio-Cortez — criticized that funding in a letter last year, saying that PREPA’s restoration plans would only entrench fossil fuels and the problems that the island’s energy grid have already faced for years.
Ocasio-Cortez highlighted the letter on Tuesday, saying that lawmakers’ prediction has now come true. “More than 4 years after Maria and Irma wiped out power for 70 percent of the Island, the grid was still extremely vulnerable to natural disasters. This weekend’s infrastructure failure was tragically predictable,”
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