Chile’s government has enacted a state of emergency after a huge power outage left millions in the South American country without electricity and plunged the capital Santiago into darkness.
Tuesday’s widespread blackout, the country’s largest in years, was caused by a high-voltage transmission line failure in Chile’s north, Interior Minister Carolina Toha said, ruling out sabotage.
Speaking in a late-night television address to the nation, Chilean President Gabriel Boric said eight million homes had been affected by the outage, which he blamed on private firms.
“What happened today is outrageous because it’s not tolerable that one or several companies impact the everyday life of millions of Chileans, and that’s why it’s the state’s duty to hold them responsible,” Boric said.
Chile’s national disaster response service, Senapred, said 14 of the country’s 16 regions were affected.
Chile’s government has established a curfew from 10pm to 6am on Wednesday (01:00 to 09:00 GMT) from the northernmost port of Arica to the southern region of Los Lagos.
The Ministry of the Interior also said it was deploying armed forces across the country – which stretches 4,300km (more than 2,600 miles) along the southern Pacific coast – to maintain order.
As of 10pm (01:00 GMT), only about a quarter of the country’s electrical grid demand was back online, said Juan Carlos Olmedo, the board president of Chile’s National Electricity Coordinator (CEN).
Olmedo added that power could be fully restored by morning.
CEN Executive Director Ernesto Huber said the body had “activated several power stations, mainly hydroelectric stations” to try and meet demand in the meantime.
Streetlights in Santiago went dark and sirens blared on Tuesday, as the capital’s metro – which transports millions of passengers a day – was closed and passengers evacuated, the Reuters news agency reported.
Chile’s transport minister, Juan Carlos Munoz, urged people to stay home, as he cautioned that only about 27 percent of Santiago’s traffic lights were working.
“There’s nothing. There’s no cash. No money. Nothing,” Santiago resident Jose Luis Orlandini told Reuters.
Authorities at Santiago’s Arturo Merino Benitez International Airport said terminals are using emergency power and flights are operating as normal.
There were shocks to global metal markets as the outage caused large copper mines to stop operating in northern Chile, which is the world’s largest producer of the metal.
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