Nearly six dozen Oncor trucks are expected to reaching the northern shore of Puerto Rico on Friday morning, in a coordinated effort to restore power to the island following Hurricane Maria.
Around 80 Oncor employees and contractors who volunteered to help with the effort will be traveling by air to meet the trucks, including five from the West Texas region, one of them being from Odessa.
These employees will be joining a wave of 1,500 additional workers who are traveling to the U.S. territory. Thousands of employees from the mainland have already been in Puerto Rico for several months helping to restore power.
“We’re teaming up to go ahead and get these areas restored with power,” Oncor Customer Operations Manager Gus Ortega said. “We’re honored and humbled to be able to lend our employees, equipment and expertise to help restore power back to the area.”
The areas Oncor will be helping out will be in the north coastal plains region Ortega said, near the city of Arecibo.
Puerto Rico has been having troubles restoring their power to several areas on the island since Hurricane Maria struck last September. Around 63 percent of Puerto Rico’s 30,000 miles of electrical line has been affected and around 50,000 power poles and 500 towers need to be repaired or replaced.
Ortega said their employees will be helping out in Puerto Rico for the next 30 days, expecting to return sometime around the middle of February.
