New blackout hits swaths of Venezuela including Caracas

A new blackout swept across Venezuela on Monday, including much of Caracas, sowing alarm two weeks after a nationwide outage that paralyzed the country. The power cut in the capital occurred around 1:20 pm (1720 GMT) and knocked out electricity in the city center. After nightfall, many apartment buildings in the Caracas metro area -- home to around six million people -- were aglow again and traffic lights were back on, but people reported they were still in the dark in many other states.

Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez blamed the latest blackout on “an attack on the charging and transmission center” at the Guri dam, which supplies 80 percent of the power to the country of 30 million. “What (last time) took days, now has been taken care of in just a few hours,” Rodriguez said, saying the fix had been made in “record time.” Earlier, a local newspaper reported that the power was out at Venezuela’s main international airport outside Caracas. Cellphone signals were disrupted and television was blanked out.

Shops hastily lowered shutters, fearing looters. President Nicolas Maduro’s government blamed the outage on an “attack” targeting the Guri hydroelectric plant. Rodriguez told state television that the opposition was responsible, claiming it “wants to plunge the population into profound unease.” Juan Guaido, the opposition leader recognized as Venezuela’s interim president by the US and many of its allies, countered on Twitter that Maduro’s government “uses these moments to disinform and create anxiety.”

He said “at least 17” of the country’s 23 states were affected, as well as much of the capital district covering Caracas, retweeting a graphic by web monitoring organization NetBlocks showing the internet down for 57 percent of Venezuela. Anxious Twitter users who were online said several big cities in the west of the country including Barquisimeto, Maracaibo and Barinas were impacted.

“Not another blackout, no God, no,” tweeted Flore Melero, a 29-year-old resident in the town of Ocumare del Tuy southeast of Caracas. During last blackout which started on March 7 and lasted a week, more than a dozen patients in hospitals died, public transport came to a halt, production slowed in the vital oil sector and water supplies were interrupted, forcing citizens to turn to sewage outflows and polluted water sources.