San Juan: Hurricane Maria, the most powerful storm to make a direct hit on Puerto Rico in almost a century, has ravaged the island and knocked out electricity supply across the island, the media reported.
Governor Ricardo Rossello told CNN on Wednesday night that the entire system was down. "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," Rossello said.
"It depends on the damage to the infrastructure... 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 Governor told CNN that at least one person was killed in the storm when a board was ripped from the house it had been nailed to by the wind and hit the victim.
"We still don't have a lot of information... We're virtually disconnected in terms of communications with the southeast part of the island."
Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, a US territory with 3.3 million people, earlier on Wednesday as a category 4 storm, reports Efe news.
After moving past Puerto Rico, it has now weakened to a category 2 storm and was currently advancing towards the eastern part of the Dominican Republic with winds of up to 175 km/h, the Washington-based National Hurricane Centre (NHC) announced.
The hurricane, which made landfall in Puerto Rico on Wednesday as category 4, is located 90 km east-northeast of Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, and is moving toward the northwest at 19 km/h, according to the United States National Hurricane Centre (NHC).