Puerto Rico governor: Power could be out for months

Puerto Rico governor: Power could be out for months

Puerto Rico's energy grid took such a severe blow from deadly Hurricane Maria that restoring power to everyone may take months,

  The entire system is down, the governor said. No one on the island has power from utilities.

Puerto Rico, which has been through a long recession and is deeply in debt, has a power grid that is "a little bit old, mishandled and weak,"

   "It depends on the damage to the infrastruacture," he said. "I'm afraid it's probably going to be severe. If it is ... we're looking at months as opposed to weeks or days."

The impact of the storm on the island territory won't be realized until officials can do a flyover and see what remains.

Rosselló said officials think some power stations are not badly damaged, but the distribution system is ruined. If transmission lines are in better shape than thought, power outages might be fixed sooner, the governor said.

A man reported"at least one person died in the storm when a board was ripped from the house it had been nailed to by the wind and hit a man."The governor said the number of casualties in some areas is unknown because it is hard to communicate."

"We still don't have a lot of information," he said. "We're virtually disconnected in terms of communications with the southeast part of the island."

The storm -- which restrengthened into a Category 3 hurricane early Thursday -- has ravaged the Caribbean over the past few days, wreaking devastation on Dominica and the Virgin Islands before slamming into Puerto Rico.

And the threat is not yet over. A hurricane warning is in effect for the Turks and Caicos, the southeastern Bahamas and parts of the Dominican Republic.