Cuba’s power grid collapses leaving it without electricity 3rd time this month
Cuba’s power grid collapsed, leaving the country without electricity for a third time in March as the communist Government battles with a decaying infrastructure and a US-imposed oil blockade.
The Cuban Electric Union, which reports to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, announced a total blackout across the island without initially giving a cause for the outage.
The union later said the blackout was caused by an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camaguey province. “From that moment, a cascading effect occurred in the machines that were online,” said a report from the Ministry of Energy and Mines, which activated “micro-islands” of generating units to provide power to vital centres, hospitals and water systems.
Authorities said they were working to restore power. Power outages, whether nationwide or regional, have become relatively common in the last two years due to breakdowns in the aging infrastructure. The breakdowns are compounded by daily blackouts of up to 12 hours caused by fuel shortages, which also destabilise the system. The last nationwide blackout occurred on Monday.
Saturday’s outage was the second in the past week and the third in March.
The blackouts have a significant impact on the population, whose lives are disrupted by reduced work hours, lack of electricity for cooking and food spoilage when refrigerators stop working, among many other consequences. In some cases, hospitals have cancelled surgeries.
