About 98% of Chile's population was left Tuesday without electricity, prompting President Gabriel Boric Font to decree a curfew between 10 pm to 6 am Wednesday with 3,000 troops deployed nationwide. The outage began at 3.16 pm after a failure in an ISA InterChile transmission line between Vallenar and Coquimbo, causing a chain reaction that disconnected key parts of the national grid. Boric said the incident was “intolerable,” and vowed to hold the subsidiary of Colombia’s ISA accountable.
Argentina has opened an inquiry into what caused a massive blackout that left nearly 50 million people without power, Energy Minister Gustavo Lopetegui said on Monday.
A massive blackout left tens of millions of people without electricity in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and parts of Chile and southern Brazil on Sunday. The Argentine president called it an “unprecedented” failure in the countries' interconnected power grid.
Argentina's Energy Secretary Gustavo Lopetegui described the massive blackout suffered mostly by Argentina and Uruguay, but which also affected areas of neighbouring countries, Paraguay, Chile and Brazil as “an extraordinary event that should have never happened, there are no reasons for it occurring and leaving Argentina completely in the black”.
A new massive blackout was recorded this weekend in Venezuela after a nationwide interruption of electricity service this Friday, which was slowly restored in main cities as Caracas. However, a new relapse of the supply occurred on Saturday night, affecting 16 states of the country - more than half.