An “unwanted operation” in Chilean electric company ISA Interchile’s systems caused a nationwide blackout on Tuesday afternoon, prompting far-left President Gabriel Boric to declare a state of emergency and curfew that lasted through Wednesday morning.
The blackout effectively shut down the entire country and was the nation’s worst since a magnitude 8.8 earthquake in March 2010. Chile, the world’s top copper producer, saw its copper industry paralyzed by the outage. Additionally, the power cut forced the ongoing Viña del Mar music festival to reschedule its program for Saturday, March 1.
According to Chilean government officials, at least three people medically dependent on electricity died during the blackout. It remains unclear at the time of writing if the deaths were directly caused by the power outage or a lack of backup generators. Chilean Health Minister Ximena Aguilera said that a clinical audit will be carried out to determine any possible responsibilities in the deaths of the three individuals.
Electricity was restored to 90 percent of Chilean households as of Wednesday morning, with reports of intermittent power in some cities. On the same morning, Reuters relayed that “major copper mines slowly came back online.”
Juan Carlos Olmedo, head of the board of directors of the National Electric Coordinator (CEN), explained on late Tuesday evening that the blackout occurred at 3:16 PM local time as a result of an “unwanted operation” in the control and protection systems of a northern power line.
“This is like any automatic system, which has a logic under which it must operate normally,” he explained. “On this occasion, it did not follow that logic. It did not operate according to the logic that was expected.”
“When this type of failure occurs, we conduct a rigorous investigation of the operation of all control systems of generating plants and transmission lines,” Olmedo said.
Public Security Minister Carolina Tohá likewise confirmed that the outage was due to a system failure, ruling out an attack as the cause. Tohá announced on Wednesday morning that the Chilean government will conduct a “thorough investigation” to determine the reasons behind the blackout, and the possible sanctions that those found responsible will be subjected to. The minister asserted that the blackout should have never occurred according to the nation’s current standards and regulations.
“Chile has a system with safeguards, with ways to deal with outages like this, which has to function correctly and, if it fails, we must enforce the norms we have as a country and the sanctions that correspond to that failure,” she said.
Tohá also revealed that 207 individuals were arrested during the state of emergency curfew.
“Among those arrested there are curfew violators but there are also people arrested for flagrante delicto, for other reasons that were detected during the patrols that were being carried out,” she said, without providing further details.
President Gabriel Boric addressed the then-ongoing blackout on late Tuesday evening. He provided further details on the failure of ISA Interchile’s systems as power was slowly restored throughout the night. Boric stressed that his government “will not let this go by” and asserted that his administration will act firmly against the companies that have not “risen to the occasion.”
“Because it is not tolerable that the daily lives of millions of Chilean men and women are affected by the responsibility of one or several companies. And therefore, it is the duty of the State of Chile to enforce those responsibilities,” the president said. “But now, as [Energy Minister Diego] Pardow said in a previous press conference, all our energy is focused on that the companies comply with the recovery of the system and that the electricity is supplied throughout the national territory.”
ISA Interchile, a subsidiary of Colombian conglomerate ISA, shared a statement with local outlets on Wednesday morning explaining that an event at a double-circuit electric transmission line triggered the “unavailability of the electric service that affected the country.”
The company said that it is currently investigating the reasons for the incident “initially caused by the unwanted activation of its protection schemes,” which led to the line’s circuits automatically disconnecting.
ISA Interchile further claimed that teams on the ground were able to restore electricity “as soon as possible,” saying that it achieved power recovery at 4:00 PM local time, or 44 minutes after the outage began.
“We will also collaborate with the investigation into the unavailability of the electrical service that affected the country and its recovery plan,” the company said.
Spanish news agency EFE reported that “significant material damage has been reported, both in important infrastructure and at the domestic level, since the return of electricity has affected refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers and other appliances.”
A Scotiabank branch in Santiago, Chile, was robbed during the blackout, with a group of unidentified individuals stealing nearly 400 million Chilean pesos, or roughly $424,000. Chilean Prosecutor Javiera Inostroza told reporters that there is not much background information on the robbery, as the bank’s security cameras were not recording during the blackout, but evidence suggests that the assailants broke into a window before breaching the vault.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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