The head of Puerto Rico’s power authority quit on Friday, about two months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island and amid lingering questions over why a $300 million contract for power grid repairs was awarded to a company that had just two employees at the time.
Ricardo Ramos resignation came days after Puerto Rico’s governor announced that power generation had reached 50 percent of capacity, only to see an outage leave parts of San Juan without power for hours, CNN reported.
The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which is bankrupt, did not say why Ramos was stepping down in a statement.
Gov. Ricardo Rosselló told reporters that Ramos’ tenure at PREPA had become “unsustainable.”
The authority was hammed after signing the $300 million contract to restore power with Whitefish Energy, a Montana-based firm based in the hometown of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
The state-owned utility cancelled the deal shortly after a public backlash.
“I chose to contract with Whitefish because my priority was securing the immediate assistance that we needed to begin restoring power as quickly as possible to our most critical customers,” Ramos said in prepared testimony at a Senate hearing this week, the network reported.