Electricity providers in Santiago, Chile’s capital, raced to restore service early Thursday after an outage left hundreds of thousands of customers without power, officials said.
Around midnight, a tree fell on a high-voltage transmission tower owned by a private company, Chile’s National Disaster Prevention and Response Service said in a statement. Enel Distribución, the country’s electricity distributor, confirmed the outage as well. The damaged tower is in the southeastern part of the city.
Videos on social media showed a large part of the city plunging into darkness shortly after midnight. At least 428,000 customers in multiple parts of the city, or about 6 percent of the population of Santiago’s metropolitan area, were without power, Chile’s National Disaster Prevention and Response Service said in another statement.
Enel Distribución said that it was working with transmission companies to restore power.
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