Don't know if this is still the case, but then you have this:
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060062975
Sixteen days after Hurricane Maria destroyed Puerto Rico's electric power grid, few if any utility crews from the United States have reached the island to assist with power restoration.
The American Public Power Association, based in Washington, confirmed today that the troubled Puerto Rico public utility that serves more than 3 million people on the island has decided not to request assistance from the group of 1,100 U.S. electricity companies standing ready to help.
The association coordinates mutual aid disaster assistance for U.S. public power companies, which include the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA). "The request for help was not activated," said group spokeswoman Meena Dayak. "We do have people who are ready to help."
Nearly 90 percent of Puerto Rico's electricity customers remain without power. Instead of activating a mutual aid arrangement that might have speeded up recovery time, the utility turned to Whitefish Energy Holdings, a small contractor based in Montana, to coordinate outside help. ... Whitefish, a subsidiary of COMTRAFO Brazil, an engineering services firm that specializes in electric power transformers, said on social media that it had won a general contract to rebuild power lines in Puerto Rico. Whitefish has said it has committed an initial 200 power line employees to restoring the grid with a possibility of adding 200 or 300 more.
The article continues to say that DOE and FEMA have personnel on the ground, as well.
That's the decision, if the article's true, of the territorial government of Puerto Rico. I don't know why they made this decision, and I'm not going to speculate as to their reason. Maybe they're relying on FEMA to do the heavy lifting without the need to feel indebted to anybody else; maybe they didn't want people not directly under their authority all over their island; maybe the guy in charge of PREPA, the power authority, or the governor bought a whole lot of COMTRAFO stock the day before making the decision or has the hots for the COMTRAFO CEO's son or daughter. Or perhaps they thought this was the best way of doing things for some completely different reason that I simply don't know and can't imagine. Seems silly to try to nail down the actual cause given, well, no information.
It took weeks to get power restored after Ike in Houston, and that was with easy access to everywhere in the city--roads were quickly unblocked, population wasn't spread out over a 40 x 90 mile area, much of it mountainous, few utility poles were down, it was easy to get men and materiel where it needed to be, and those involved weren't busy defending personal power and jurisdiction. Just take the first point: One of my wife's coworkers lived on a street with a lot of old trees. The morning after Ike tore through she took a picture of her street, with maybe a dozen trees down and across the road. She took a picture a few hours later, with all the trees cut into lengths and stacked off the road. The city road crews were still working their way out from their depots, but on that street there were people with chainsaws. Yet more than two weeks after Ike, that street still didn't have power. It came on briefly a couple of times and then the workers moved on to another neighborhood; they came back later to find where that part of the net was being improperly grounded and fix it--the 'common good' meant 'get as many people back on the grid as possible as quickly as possible' and that meant triage.
The more immediate problem is assuming that we have all the information to make any judgment, without even having to bother to make a search. "I haven't seen it, therefore it must be the case it's not happening." And, if it's not happening, the easy, convenient reason that comes to mind must be the right one.
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