SANTIAGO, Feb 27 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Millions of Chileans were left without electricity after a major, highly unusual blackout which caused chaos across the country.
The area without power stretched all the way from Arica in the long, narrow South American country’s north to Los Lagos in the south, according to the Senapred disaster response agency — an area that is home to over 90 percent of Chile’s population of 20 million people.
The blackout, which hit in Tuesday mid-afternoon and was the worst in well over a decade, brought the Santiago metro to a halt, forcing the evacuation of thousands of people.
The metro company, which transports 2.3 million passengers every day, said workers were deployed to all stations “to support safe evacuations.”
The government ruled out an attack or sabotage as the reason for the power loss in the middle of the southern hemisphere summer, saying a system failure was more likely to blame.
With traffic lights out of service, causing major transport gridlock, some residents of the capital had to walk for hours under a hot sun to reach their homes.
Shops and offices closed early.
“They let us leave work because of the power cut, but now I don’t know how we will get home because all the buses are full,” worker Maria Angelica Roman, 45, said in Santiago.
“At the bank where I work, all operations had to stop,” 25-year-old clerk Jonathan Macalupu said.
President Gabriel Boric overflew the capital by helicopter to assess the situation.
The Chilevision broadcaster showed video of people trapped on a mechanical ride several meters high at an amusement park in Santiago before being rescued.
Local media also reported people trapped in elevators.
In the coastal city of Valparaíso, witnesses also reported shops and businesses closing early and traffic chaos.
Chile boasts one of the best power networks in South America, and has not had a blackout this big in about 15 years.
In 2010, damage to a power plant in southern Chile plunged hundreds of thousands of people into darkness for several hours.
That outage happened a month after a massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake killed more than 500 people and rocked the national power grid.
Interior Minister Carolina Toha said of the latest outage Tuesday that there was “no reason to assume that this is an attack.”
It was more likely “a failure in the system’s operation,” she told reporters, adding the grid should be back online “in the coming hours.”
The country’s hospital system and prisons were operating on emergency generators. — NNN-AGENCIES
