Electricity providers in Santiago, Chile’s capital, rushed to restore service early Thursday after a blackout left hundreds of thousands of customers without power, officials said.
Around midnight, a tree fell on a high-voltage transmission tower owned by a private company, Chile’s National Disaster Prevention and Attention Service said in a statement. Enel DistribuciĆ³n, the country’s electricity distributor, confirmed the cut too. The damaged tower is located in the southeastern part of the city.
The outage resulted in a loss of power equivalent to about 10 percent of Santiago’s electricity demand, or 260 megawatts, the National Electric Coordinator, the grid operator, said in a statement. The power supply was cut at four substations in the southeast of Santiago, he said.
Videos spread on social media showed much of the city plunged into darkness shortly after midnight. At least 428,000 customers in multiple parts of the city, or about 6 percent of the population of the Santiago metropolitan area, were left without electricity, Chile’s National Disaster Prevention and Attention Service said in another statement.
Enel DistribuciĆ³n said it was working with transmission companies to restore power.
This is a developing story.