Tropical Storm Oscar is making Cuba’s nationwide power outage even worse

Tropical Storm Oscar is making it harder to restore power in Cuba after a massive, prolonged power outage that preceded the storm.

The nation’s power grid failed on Friday after Cuba’s largest power plant went offline, leaving more than 10 million people without electricity. The grid reportedly collapsed four more times before Oscar made landfall as a Category 1 storm on Sunday evening.

Oscar is hitting a key region for power generation where at least two important power plants in the city of Holguín Santiago de Cuba are located. The storm creates “an additional inconvenience,” the Associated Press reports Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy saying in a news conference. The storm is still barreling through Cuba today, posing new dangers to residents and complicating efforts to get the power grid running again.

Oscar is still dangerous even though it has weakened into a tropical storm since making landfall. Heavy rainfall is expected to trigger “life-threatening flash flooding along with mudslides across portions of eastern Cuba, especially within the Sierra Maestra” through midweek, according to the US National Hurricane Center.

Authorities are working with the aim of restoring power by Tuesday, de la O Levy said. Several days without power have already taken a big toll, leaving people without running water systems (since water pumps need electricity) or refrigeration to keep food from rotting.

Even before last week’s crisis, Cuba was already teetering on an energy crisis with an aging power grid and looming fuel shortages. Officials say they’re working to get micro power grid systems running to restore electricity region by region until “greater stability” can be achieved.