MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Buenos Aires under second mass blackout in a day

Even the Casa Rosada was hit by the power outage

A second massive blackout hit the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA) and parts of the so-called Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA) Wednesday after a first outage at 5:50 am affected some 550,000 Edesur users in the neighborhoods of Balvanera, Barracas, Boedo, Caballito, La Boca, Monserrat, Parque Patricios, Recoleta, Retiro, and San Nicolás as well as in the municipalities of Avellaneda, Berazategui, Lanús, Lomas de Zamora, and Quilmes, bordering the country's capital. Edelap, the energy distribution company of La Plata, was also affected.

The second interruption targeted a more populated area, including the Casa Rosada and Congress buildings, as well as almost every Government Office in downtown Buenos Aires.

Traffic chaos ensued as all subway services were off, much to the disappointment of office workers given the day off en masse at the same time. Crowds swarmed onto bus stops in numbers probably never seen before. In addition, vehicle circulation had to cope with the absence of working traffic lights.

Energy Secretary María Tettamanti said she was overseeing restoration efforts at SACME, the operations center for Edenor and Edesur, while maintenance teams worked to stabilize power, particularly at Casa Rosada.

There is no official information on when power will be restored to the nearly 622,000 users without electricity, which also affected telecommunications and internet services.

Edesur, the company supplying electricity to southern CABA and AMBA, released a statement on X saying that:

“We inform [the citizenry] that there was a failure in a high voltage line that affects several of our substations. Our technicians are working to restore the service. We are in contact.”

“The outage that is occurring at this moment is due to a fault in two 220 KV high voltage lines of Costanera-Hudson, belonging to the distribution system of the company Edesur. It affects the south of GBA and south of CABA. There are 800 MW of service outage and 2,500 MW of generation out of service,” the National Energy Secretariat explained.

”There are no inconveniences to attend with normality the rest of the Argentine Interconnection System (SADI). The ENRE is investigating in order to proceed according to the regulatory framework in terms of fines and penalties,” added the agency.