Bradenton couple on wedding anniversary trip in Puerto Rico endures island-wide blackout
Arlene Maltes and her husband, Luis Vazquez, had been in Puerto Rico to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary for only a day when the blackout happened.
A power outage Wednesday swept across the U.S. territory of 3.5 million people after a fire erupted at an electricity plant that serves most of the island. By Friday, about 75 percent of 1.5 million homes and businesses served by the island’s power company had electricity restored.
“I’m going to be honest, I think most people immediately thought this could have been a terrorist attack,” Maltes said Friday evening on the phone from Puerto Rico.
Maltes, a 41-year-old pastor who lives in Bradenton, said she was with an aunt on the way to pick up Vazquez, 28, and his uncle at a car dealership in Lares, a mountain municipality in Puerto Rico’s central-western area. It was Wednesday afternoon, and the four were going to eat lunch together when Vazquez called Maltes after seeing a video of the explosive fire.
“They had seen on the news that a plant had exploded, and instantly all the 600,000 people in the area had been without lights,” said Maltes, who is originally from Puerto Rico. “We were affected immediately.”
It was something they never saw coming, Vazquez said.
As the night started, that’s when you could see that there was no way for people to be moving around because there were no lights at all. Everybody had to sleep with no lights.
Arlene Maltes
Bradenton resident“We were without lights, there were no traffic lights ... there was a lot of traffic,” he said in Spanish. “Everything was congested.”
Because the sun was still out when the blackout struck, Maltes said it wasn’t until night fell that she saw the raw impact.
“You could see nothing, all you could see was the lights of the cars. You could see nothing at all,” she said. “As the night started, that’s when you could see that there was no way for people to be moving around because there were no lights at all (with the exception of businesses with generators). ... A lot of people obviously were not able to cook because their lights had been off. A lot of people have lost food.”
The following morning, Maltes observed something striking.
“People were outside talking to each other instead of talking on the phone,” she said. “You saw a lot of people checking on each other, making sure they had water. It wasn’t a great experience because we had no power, but it was actually a nice experience to see people turning to each other, to make sure their house was okay, that their property was OK. ... You could see the human side of people coming out.”
The couple plans on enjoying the rest of their trip sightseeing, which they couldn’t do during the blackout, and will return home to Bradenton next week.
This story was originally published September 23, 2016 at 8:37 PM with the headline "Bradenton couple on wedding anniversary trip in Puerto Rico endures island-wide blackout."