SANTO DOMINGO, Feb 23 (Reuters) – The Dominican Republic was hit by a nationwide blackout on Monday following a “major failure” in its national power grid, authorities said, the second outage in three months.
The outage halted traffic, disrupted public transport services and forced some businesses to shut as repair crews worked to bring electricity back online.
The failure in the power grid occurred at approximately 10:50 a.m., the country’s Minister of Energy and Mines, Joel Santos, said at a press conference.
Santos said the power outage was caused by a failure on a transmission line switch that tripped and pushed the system into protection mode.
“From the very first moment, the established protocols for this situation were activated, with the goal of restoring the system as quickly as possible,” Santos told the press.
The state-owned Dominican Electricity Transmission Company said the country’s main power plants cut output without warning before midday, triggering shutdowns at other generating units.
By mid-afternoon, the grid was back to nearly 30% of normal capacity, according to Santos.
Santos said hospitals, water services, mass transit and airports were running on backup power.
Power outages are common in the Caribbean nation, which last experienced a nationwide blackout in November.
(Reporting by Paul Mathiasen, Writing by Iñigo Alexander; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
