Power has been restored to most of Chile’s 19 million people 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 on Wednesday that electricity had largely returned to Chile’s 14 afflicted regions, although 220,000 residents remained without power.
Tohá told reporters that authorities were also investigating the circumstances under which three people died during Tuesday’s blackout, saying they had been “dependent on electricity”, without offering further details.
As trains and the subway service started back up again in the country’s capital of Santiago, the government said it would not extend the state of emergency that expired early on Wednesday.
.jpeg?auto=webp&width=800)
