September 28, 2022
Introduction
On September 18, 2022, Hurricane Fiona reached Puerto Rico, almost exactly five years after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in one of the worst natural disasters in recent history. Fiona was the strongest storm to hit the island since Maria in 2017 and brought torrential rains that led to flash flooding across much of Puerto Rico. While Fiona was a Category 1 storm when it reached the island, its 30+ inches of rain have caused tremendous damage, leaving many residents without power or water over a week after the storm.
In the years following Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm, Puerto Rico’s power grid has been unreliable at best, with frequent outages, causing intermittent shutdowns of schools, workplaces, and hospitals.
Residents remain frustrated with LUMA Energy; the privatized organization took over power distribution and transmission networks (a.k.a. “the grid”) from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) in June 2021. While LUMA is responsible for operating and maintaining the grid going forward, neglect of the aging transmission and distribution infrastructure has long been an issue–one that Hurricanes Maria and Fiona have widely exposed.
Below, we’ll examine the effects of Hurricane Fiona on Internet connectivity in Puerto Rico. We discovered that consumer networks appeared to be most heavily impacted from the storm, while university and government-related hosts maintained somewhat more consistent uptime.
