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Most of Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million people without power

All of the island’s schools were closed Thursday.

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The stolen data includes users’ names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and security questions for verifying an accountholder’s identity.

The governor of Puerto Rico has said power is slowly being restored almost 24 hours after a blackout swept across the island.

About 12 hours into the blackout power had been restored to just over 130,000 customers, Padilla said Thursday morning.

He said he understood people’s frustrations and the need to blame someone for the blackout, which plunged the USA territory’s 3.5 million inhabitants into darkness.

“But, again, this is a very, very ambitious goal”, he said, adding: “I want people to start their week without any problems”.

Miguel Caraballo, a 30-year-old San Juan bank worker, said his power returned late Thursday. Blame me. I’ll take the blame.

Garcia expressed sympathy for people’s frustrations over the outage, which comes amid a decade-long economic crunch that has worn down Puerto Ricans.

For those who could afford it, hotels offered special rates for residents that were quickly snapped up. Meanwhile, four police officers were struck by vehicles while directing traffic but were expected to recover.

The governor said at least one person died the first night from exposure to carbon monoxide after setting up a personal generator.

Localized power outages are common in Puerto Rico, which has an outdated energy infrastructure, but widespread failures such as this are extremely rare.

It was unclear how much damage the fire caused or where the power company would obtain the money to fix or buy new equipment. And a utility spokesman says that tripped circuit breakers, automatically shutting down the flow of power as a preventive measure. Executive director Javier Quintana said a preliminary investigation suggests that an apparent failure on one transmission line that might have been caused by lightning caused the switch to explode. Even Puerto Rican Gov. Alejandro García Padilla appeared concerned: “Given that the system is so old, numerous setbacks could occur”, he said at a news conference.

According to the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día, a fire at a substation damaged two 230,000-volt power lines, resulting in a massive power outage that is still affecting customers across the island.

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PREPA plants are largely outdated, and the agency has debt of more than $8 billion.

Puerto Rico blackout: Nearly 1.5 million without power