By State › Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico: Overview

Download all of Puerto Rico as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Puerto Rico exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and a legal framework that runs on civil law, not the English common law every state’s page on this site is built on, which changes water rights and several other legal questions in ways worth understanding before assuming a state-page answer transfers over. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Puerto Rico go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

Hurricane Maria: the longest blackout in U.S. history

Hurricane Maria made landfall near Yabucoa on September 20, 2017, as a high-end Category 4 storm with sustained winds of 155 mph. The island’s power grid didn’t come back for 328 days, nearly 11 months, the longest blackout in U.S. history and the second-largest in world history; the last home reconnected was in rural Ponce. The human toll took over a year to actually settle: Puerto Rico’s government initially reported 64 deaths, but a government-commissioned George Washington University study released in August 2018 put excess mortality at 2,975 in the months after landfall, the figure the territorial government then formally adopted, while an independent Harvard study estimated as many as 4,645 using a different methodology. Total damage ran approximately $90 billion, almost entirely borne by Puerto Rico itself, and a month after landfall roughly 29% of the island, close to a million people, still had no running water. See the Risks page for the full data.

The grid never really recovered, and it’s still failing island-wide

The power system that took 328 days to rebuild after Maria hasn’t stabilized since. On December 31, 2024, a failed line at the Costa Sur plant cascaded into an island-wide failure that cut power to roughly 1.2 of Puerto Rico’s 1.47 million customers. On April 16, 2025, a single transmission line brought down by overgrown vegetation, a line that had already failed 23 separate times in the prior year, took out power for 1.4 million customers and water service for over 400,000 more as a direct knock-on effect. The utility’s own 2023 reliability numbers explain why: PREPA/LUMA’s distribution grid averaged roughly 1,022 outage-minutes per customer per year against 4.7 separate outage events, three to six times worse than typical mainland utilities on both measures, while the utility’s operator has fallen well short of its own contracted improvement targets. PREPA itself remains in unresolved federal bankruptcy proceedings as of this writing. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification, but Tier 3, “no more fuel deliveries, no grid to return to,” isn’t the distant edge case here that it is in most of this manual’s coverage area: it’s the documented, lived experience of a large share of Puerto Rico’s population for the better part of a year after Maria, and island-wide outages have recurred since on a multi-month cycle rather than a multi-decade one. Households here have a real reason to treat Tier 3 energy and water planning as a near-term possibility, not a remote contingency. Puerto Rico also experienced a serious earthquake sequence in January 2020 (a magnitude 6.4 mainshock left thousands displaced and damaged a power plant supplying over a quarter of the island’s electricity), a reminder that the grid’s fragility isn’t only a hurricane problem. And because Puerto Rico’s legal system runs on civil law rather than the common-law framework every state page on this site assumes, the Laws page below is worth reading even for household preparedness questions (like water rights) that seem purely practical rather than legal.

Sources