Power restored to much of Argentina and Uruguay

Power has been restored to much of Argentina and Uruguay after a massive electrical failure left tens of millions of people in the dark.

The Argentine president Mauricio Macri called it an “unprecedented” failure in the countries’ interconnected power grid and promised a full investigation..

Authorities were working frantically to restore power, and by the evening, electricity had returned to 98 percent of Argentina, according to state news agency Telam.

Power also had been restored to most of Uruguay’s 3 million people as well as to people in neighboring Paraguay.

Parts of Chile were also affected.

Earlier Sunday, Argentine voters were forced to cast ballots by the light of cellphones in gubernatorial elections. Public transportation was halted, shops closed and patients dependent on home medical equipment were urged to go to hospitals with generators.

Argentine media reported that the outage was linked to a failure in the transmission of electricity from the Yacycretá hydroelectric dam.

Argentina’s Energy Minister Gustavo Lopetegui insisted that the country’s electrical system was “very robust,” but added that the exact cause of this failure was unclear.

Via BBC