Chile declares curfew as power outage sweeps across country

By Yan Zhuan and John Bartlett

Chile’s government imposed a curfew Tuesday and sent the army and national police officers to patrol the streets in response to a sweeping blackout that cut electricity to most of the country.

The huge outage, which began in the afternoon, affected 8 million households in the South American nation of 19 million people, officials said.

The affected area spanned 1,700 miles, from Arica in the north — home to many of the country’s copper mines — to Chiloé island in the south, they said. In Santiago, it knocked out traffic lights, stranded people in elevators and shut down the subway network.

By midnight, power had been restored for 90% of residential consumers, the National Electrical Coordinator said. Officials promised that electricity would be restored to everyone by dawn.

The government had earlier announced a curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. in the regions affected. Schools in those areas were to be closed Wednesday, with about 300,000 students affected, officials said.

“Today has been a difficult day for millions of countrymen,” President Gabriel Boric said at a news conference Tuesday night.

As officials scrambled to restore power, nonfunctioning stoplights caused traffic chaos in Santiago and masses of commuters were evacuated from the subway, spilling out onto the streets and vying for spots on replacement buses.

“People were sprinting everywhere trying to get to the buses,” said Patricio Rodriguez, 35. “Everyone was desperate to get home.”

Rodriguez said he had to walk 9 miles to get to his aunt’s house. “People were driving the wrong way up the main roads, it was chaos,” he said. “It was like the Wild West — it felt lawless.”

Boric warned that the recovery was slow and unstable, and the situation remained precarious.

He blamed the country’s power companies for allowing the outage to occur and for not restoring power earlier, adding, “This is outrageous.” The outage was caused by failure of a transmission system, officials said.

Soldiers in trucks were deployed to affected areas to enforce the curfew, while the national police was sent to direct traffic and patrol streets, according to authorities. In Santiago, helicopters circled the city.

The national police said on social media that they had rescued residents who were stuck in elevators and trapped in stores by automatic gates.

In some regions, residents were left without drinking water, officials said. Emergency services, hospitals, prisons and airports across the country were operating on backup electricity systems and generators, the national disaster agency said.