A blackout left a large part of the state of Zulia without electricity service in the early hours of this Thursday, according to social media users.
The interruption of the fluid began around 3:00 am and reached close to 80% of the entity. Maracaibo and at least eight other municipalities, including San Francisco, Mara, Machiques, La Concepción and La Cañada, have remained in darkness for several hours.
In some sectors the service returned intermittently after 6:00 am, but in others the failure extended beyond 7:00 am and others until after 11 in the morning and around noon they are still without electricity.
Neighbors reported the outage through social networks. Local journalists, such as Lenin Danieri, documented the arrival of ambulances at the Maracaibo University Hospital in complete darkness.
The heavy rains in the early morning further complicated the situation. Opposition leader Juan Pablo Guanipa described the event as an example of the “complete abandonment” of the national electrical system.
“There is no recovery possible as long as the same administration is maintained,” he stated.
The failure originated in the transmission network between the El Tablazo and Cuatricentenario substations, according to sources from the National Electric Corporation (Corpoelec), who did not offer further details about the breakdown or an official statement on the causes of the blackout or the service restoration plan.
This new outage adds to the series of frequent failures suffered by the Zulia region, one of the most affected by the electricity crisis in the country.
