Electricity providers in Santiago, Chile's capital, rushed to restore service Thursday morning after an outage left hundreds of thousands of customers without electricity, officials said.
Around midnight, a tree fell on a high-voltage transmission tower owned by a private company, Chile's National Disaster Prevention and Response Service said in a statement. declaration. Enel Distribución, the country's electricity distributor, confirmed also the interruption. The damaged tower is located in the southeastern part of the city.
The outage caused a power loss equivalent to about 10% of Santiago's energy demand, or 260 megawatts, the National Electrical Coordinator, the grid operator, said in a statement. declaration. Electricity was cut at four substations in southeast Santiago, he said.
Videos on social media showed much of the city plunging into darkness shortly after midnight. At least 428,000 customers in multiple parts of the city, or about 6% of the population of the Santiago metropolitan area, remained without electricity, Chile's National Disaster Prevention and Response Service said. another statement.
Enel Distribución said it was working with transmission companies to restore power.
This is a developing story.
