Chile president has declared a state of emergency on Tuesday after a sweeping blackout hit the country, stranding commuters, paralyzing countless businesses and leaving most of the South American nation without electricity.
The outage comes in the middle of Chile’s summer, impacting eight million household, said president Gabriel Boric in an address to the nation on Tuesday evening. He added that the state of emergency is aimed to “guarantee the safety” of citizens, as the outage may last for days.
While the National Electrical Coordinator, Chile’s grid operator, said a high-voltage backbone transmission line has been disrupted, they did not immediately offer an explanation for the widespread disruptions that left millions of people without electricity all the way from the northernmost Chilean port of Arica to the southern Los Lagos agricultural region.
It has impacted 14 of the 16 regions of the country, said the National Disaster Prevention and Response Services.
“We are not going to let this pass and we are going to act firmly against companies that have not risen to the occasion. For this reason, all the necessary investigations will be carried out,” said the Mr Boric as he blamed the electricity companies, reported CNN.
Meanwhile, interior minister Carolina Toha has appealed the general public to stay calm, saying that the administration was working to restore power.
“Our first concern, and the reason for this announcement, is to ensure people’s safety,” she said. “Obviously, this was something no one planned for.”
Chile’s national disaster response service, Senapred, reported only that a “disruption in the supply of electricity” had provoked a “massive power outage” across more than a dozen regions in the country, including Chile’s capital of Santiago, where authorities said there would be no subway service until further notice.
The country’s electricity distributor, Saesa, which serves more than a million people across Chile, confirmed that a nationwide power failure had affected all of its customers.
Internet and mobile services were disrupted in most part of the country. Officials said they were evacuating passengers from darkened tunnels and subway stations in Santiago and elsewhere in the country, including the coastal tourist hotspot of Valparaiso.
Videos on social media from all over Chile, home to over 19 million people, showed chaos at intersections without functioning traffic lights and evacuations of office buildings.
Mobile phone services also blinkered offline in parts of the country.
Interior Minister Carolina Tohá said she was convening officials and electricity providers in a race to restore service.
