A New Year's Eve blackout plunged Puerto Rico into darkness, impacting nearly 1.5 million residents. While families faced disrupted celebrations and inconveniences, many still found ways to mark the occasion, highlighting the resilience of Puerto Ricans.
As we prepared to welcome 2025, we woke up Tuesday morning to find the island in complete darkness. A blackout that began at 5:30 a.m. on Dec. 31 left nearly all of Puerto Rico ’s 1.47 million utility customers, including me, without power. For my family, adapting to the circumstances became part of the day’s narrative. We headed to the beach in Guánica, hoping the power would be back by the time we returned. It wasn’t.
As the sun set, I rushed to shower before utter darkness, leaving my hair unstyled — a rarity on New Year’s Eve. On social media, dozens of Puerto Rican women shared similar stories, from running extension cords to a neighbor’s generator to get their hair and makeup done, to ironing clothes using borrowed electricity.Yet, as night fell, hundreds gathered at La Parguera’s iconic New Year’s Eve street party in Lajas, a small city on the western side of the island, determined to celebrate. Mayra Ortiz, a 21-year-old from nearby Cabo Rojo, described the morning’s power outage as an all-too-familiar ordeal. “Another papelón in Puerto Rico,” she said, using local slang for a messy situation. “There are so many families who were planning to have their New Year’s Eve dinner, and now they won’t be able to. It’s frustrating to keep living under the same circumstances.”For Ortiz, the blackout wasn’t just an inconvenience, it was a reflection of deeper systemic failures that have plagued the island. “We think things are going to change with a new government, but no, everything is still the same,” Ortiz told me, expressing her disillusionment with the island’s new governor, Jenniffer González Coló
Puerto Rico Blackout New Year's Eve Resilience Systemic Issues
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