That battle began long before two devastating hurricanes hit the island last year, and the seeds of disaster had been sown long before as well. Puerto Rico’s state-owned power company, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) has been in crisis for years, and its crumbling electricity grid—with a fragile transmission scheme, little basic maintenance, extraordinary pollution, and out-of-date infrastructure—made the threat of power shortages and blackouts even for critical infrastructure a common one for millions of Puerto Ricans for years as a humanitarian crisis brewed.

PREPA is also the source of much of Puerto Rico’s debt problems, and managing the authority’s $9 billion in debt was a key goal of 2016’s PROMESA legislation, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama, that established an external federal-government-appointed Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. That board was only nominally beholden to the will of Puerto Ricans, a dynamic that from the bill’s inception has put the FOMB at odds with the elected government of Puerto Rico.

The two authorities have engaged in something of a cold war since the appointment of the board in August 2016. Rosselló’s office has strongly objected to some of the austerity measures recommended by the board, including a plan in August 2017 to furlough government workers. And the two have jockeyed for control of PREPA, although Rosselló’s plan for the embattled agency hasn’t ever seemed too far off from the FOMB’s stated goals. In September, Rosselló himself told The New York Times that PROMESA would offer a route for accelerated private investments in PREPA. And while the governor has not promoted the full sale of PREPA—a decision that would undoubtedly further weaken the power of Puerto Rican officials—he has outlined a strategy for outsourcing certain functions of PREPA and for establishing public-private partnerships for others.

The existing rivalry between government and board immediately became a flashpoint after Hurricane Maria hit in mid-September, partly because of jurisdictional issues. In its effort to transition from disaster response to recovery, FEMA has left the Army Corps of Engineers in charge of most of the infrastructure development, including the power grid, leaving the military with the responsibility of bringing over two-thirds of the power generation and power lines back. But the Corps has limited flexibility in meeting that mandate. While the Army Corps of Engineers can and will bring dilapidated pieces of the infrastructure up to code during the rebuild, it can’t transform the grid, or do much to change PREPA’s sustainability and reliability issues, nor the massive amounts of pollution the coal- and oil-dominated power generation creates.

So then who is responsible for transformation? PREPA’s ability to operate independently in planning for and in executing any long term strategy has been perhaps irrevocably damaged by a string of managerial failures after the storms.The most immediate of those is the ongoing Whitefish scandal. In the aftermath of Maria, PREPA signed a $300 million contract with the little-known Montana firm Whitefish Energy, a contract that charged exorbitant rates for certain services and exempted some provisions from federal oversight, even though the contract language stated falsely that FEMA had reviewed the contract. Media coverage and criticism from leaders such as San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz eventually led to that contract being mostly voided, but questions over PREPA’s contracting procedures dogged the struggling company, especially as another $200 million contract between PREPA and Mammoth Energy Services’ Cobra Acquisitions LLC emerged with similar provisions.