Ecuador was plunged into a nationwide blackout on Wednesday afternoon, with the country’s public works minister blaming the emergency on the failure of a key transmission line.
Minister Roberto Luque said in a statement on June 1 that he had received a report from national electricity operator CENACE regarding “transmission line failures that resulted in cascading blackouts, resulting in the absence of energy services throughout the country.” .
He said authorities were working to resolve the outage “as quickly as possible”. Within hours, power began to be restored to parts of the capital, Quito.
The South American country of 18 million people has struggled with an energy crisis for years. Infrastructure failures, lack of maintenance and reliance on imported energy have all contributed to rolling blackouts – although none were as widespread as this one.
Most Ecuadorians found themselves without power around 3:15 pm on Wednesday.
The country gets most of its energy from neighboring Colombia, which has struggled to generate enough electricity for domestic consumption.
China’s $2.25 billion Cocacodo Sinclair Dam hydroelectric plant was supposed to help solve Ecuador’s problems. The project is located on the Coca River in Napo Province, 62 miles east of Quito, and is the largest energy project in Ecuador.
Instead, the project has become a major headache for Ecuadorian authorities. Repeated construction errors have led to legal disputes between Ecuadorian officials and Chinese companies.
Back in April, the country suffered massive power outages, which the Energy Department attributed to record low water flows following a prolonged drought, rising temperatures and a lack of maintenance on the country’s power system.
In the weeks that followed, the ministry implemented power outages that lasted several hours each day. President Daniel Noboa declared an energy emergency, ordering businesses and government offices to close for several days and calling for the resignation of the energy minister.
The outages stopped in mid-May, and Luke, who is also acting energy secretary, said on June 7 that the risk of outages had eased. But this assurance was short-lived.
On June 16, parts of Quito fell into darkness again. Three days later, there was a nationwide power outage.
The streets of Quito and the port city of Guayaquil were filled with honking car horns and shouts from drivers on Wednesday night, as traffic lights stopped working and vehicles flooded the city streets. Public transportation systems and some water companies in two major cities suspended services.
Quito’s mayor expressed surprise that the blackout affected the city’s subway system, which uses “isolated” power.
“This incident must have been so serious that it even affected the electricity supply of the Quito subway,” he wrote.
Tully Ponce Guayaquil, Ecuador contributed reporting.
