Excavator blamed for island-wide blackout in Puerto Rico

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — An island-wide blackout hit Puerto Rico on Wednesday as the U.S. territory struggles to repair an increasingly unstable power grid nearly seven months after Hurricane Maria. Officials said an excavator accidentally downed a transmission line.

Officials said it could take 24 to 36 hours to fully restore power to more than 1.4 million customers as outrage grew across the island about the state of Puerto Rico's Electric Power Authority. It is the second major outage in less than a week, with the previous one affecting some 840,000 customers.

"This is too much," said Luis Oscar Rivera, a 42-year-old computer technician who just got normal power back at his house less than two months ago.