Major power outage hits 20 million people in Argentina, gov't blames SABOTAGE fire near nuclear power plant

France24
Thu, 02 Mar 2023 03:28 UTC

© Lautaro Rojo, Reuters

People wait in a long queue outside the Constitucion subway station due to a power blackout in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 1, 2023.

A major power outage crippled several of Argentina's provinces on Wednesday, including parts of Buenos Aires, plunging millions of people into darkness for at least two hours as summer temperatures soared, officials said.

In the capital, the lights flickered back on at about 6:00 pm (2100 GMT) in the metro system, and public services were gradually restored.

Reports of the first outages came in from 4:00-5:00 pm, with traffic lights out of order and Buenos Aires metro stations in total darkness.

Argentina's undersecretary for energy Santiago Yanotti told the C5N network that power demand had soared due to the high temperatures. In Buenos Aires, it was 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday.

The power cut is believed to have been caused by a fire in a field near high-tension lines connected to the Atucha 1 nuclear power plant, Yanotti said.

The plant was taken offline as a safety precaution, sparking the widespread problems nationwide, the country's national nuclear power authority Nucleoelectrica said.

There was no immediate official data on the numbers of households affected, but a government source told AFP that Cordoba, Santa Fe and Mendoza provinces along with Buenos Aires experienced outages.

Comment: Breaking news from Bloomberg details the sabotage suspicions:

A blaze that left nearly half of Argentina without power was probably sabotage, the government said.

More than 20 million people in the South American nation of 46 million had no electricity for hours on Wednesday evening after a high-tension transmission line outside the Buenos Aires metropolitan area caught fire, shutting off swaths of the grid.

Burn patterns at the scene imply saboteurs set fire to land right beneath the power line, according to a top government official.

"It's not the type of fire line you see when pastures get burned," Ricardo Casal, legal secretary to the Economy Ministry, told local news outlets. "Instead, there are precise focal points that, curiously, are under the transmission line."

The government has asked a judge to investigate.

Electricity was fully restored on Wednesday night, the Energy Secretariat said. A live state tracker of power generation and on-grid demand showed both were back to normal levels on Thursday, though nuclear power plants remained offline.

The fire came amid a heat wave and drought in Argentina, with Buenos Aires enduring its hottest summer in more than a century of record-keeping and the country's key soybean crop wilting across the Pampas farm belt.

In the US, grids have seen an unusual uptick of attacks in recent months. As of December, law enforcement agencies were investigating at least eight recent incidents in four states.

One recalls the blackouts from 2019 in Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela, that were also suspected sabotage: Entire cities in darkness after massive, first-of-its-kind blackout sweeps Argentina and Uruguay

Other suspect power outages and plant shutdowns in just the last year or so:

• 'Intentional vandalism' at substations caused power outages for 40K in North Carolina, police enforce curfew
• Canadian nuclear plant offline during record cold weather after 'unexplained' power loss and heavy water leak
• Huge blast hits major oil refinery in latest hit to Russian infrastructure, fuels suspicions of sabotage
• Europe is in trouble as FOUR more of France's nuclear power stations to go offline over winter
• Largest oil spill in Keystone pipeline history: Mystery breach sends 14,000 barrels of crude gushing over Kansas countryside
• First-ever known drone attack against US electricity grid, DHS reports (2021)