Puerto Rico's Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (AAA) said Friday it still has no estimate for repairing a broken pumping unit at the La Plata system, leaving about 20,000 customers without water service. AAA executive president, engineer Luis González Delgado, told WKAQ-580 radio that crews are still working on unit number seven, which has failed to sustain operation, and that he has not received a timeframe he can share with affected customers to help them plan.
The outage began Wednesday when a power interruption knocked out all four pumps that draw raw water from the La Plata dam to the Enrique Ortega Filtration Plant in Toa Alta. By that afternoon, three of the four units were back online, but the fourth remains out of service.
González Delgado said the plant needs about 70 million gallons of daily extraction to maintain filtration capacity and sustain service, while the broken unit has a capacity of roughly 20 million gallons per day. He called the repair complex, describing the equipment as a large industrial motor operating at high voltages, requiring more diagnostic and repair time than typical equipment, with no completion date yet available.