Power was restored to most of Chile’s 19 million people Wednesday after the country's most disruptive blackout in 15 years, the government said, as authorities lifted a strict curfew imposed when the outage left 98% of the population without electricity.
Restoring power proved to be more problematic in the country's north, where a fault in a backbone transmission line first triggered the outage that set off a chain reaction of power plant and transmission line shut-downs across the South American nation.
Chilean Interior Minister Carolina Tohá said electricity had largely returned to Chile's 14 afflicted regions, although 220,000 residents remained without power on Wednesday.
The state-owned copper company Codelco, the world's largest copper producer, and two other major companies said they were resuming operations at their mines as the power supply returned Wednesday.
“For any foreign company that was thinking about bringing resources to Chile, it generates a ‘yellow flag,'" Bernardo Castro, risk management specialist from Universidad Finis Terrae in Chile, said of the blackout.
