About 746,000 still without power in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Fiona

(Reuters) – An estimated 746,000 homes and businesses were still without power in Puerto Rico on Monday morning after Hurricane Fiona caused an island-wide power outage for its roughly 3.3 million residents.

Fiona, which was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone by the U.S. National Hurricane Center on Saturday, battered Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean a week ago, killing at least eight people.

The storm reminded many Puerto Ricans of the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria five years ago, which knocked out power for almost all 1.5 million customers for a week.

PowerOutage.us, which estimates outages based on utility data, said 746,144 customers remained without service early Monday based on information from LUMA Energy, which operates Puerto Rico’s grid.

There were roughly 928,000 customers without power early Friday out of a total 1.468 million, according to PowerOutage.us.

The widespread power outages have led to cascading energy problems for Puerto Rico, where fuel distribution limitations and surging demand for fuel to run backup generators has left many gas stations dry.

LUMA is a joint venture owned by units of Canadian energy firm ATCO Ltd (50%) and U.S. energy contractor Quanta Services Inc (50%).

(Reporting by Deep Vakil and Brijesh Patel in Bengaluru; Editing by Jan Harvey)