A Buenos Aires power outage leaves over 600,000 customers without electricity

Audio By Carbonatix

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — A power failure in Buenos Aires left hundreds of thousands of customers without electricity, shutting off traffic lights, stranding subway passengers and testing the Argentine capital’s electric grid for the second time in 24 hours during a sizzling summer heat wave.

The blackout began Wednesday at 12:40 p.m. with the sudden failure of a high-voltage power line and hit over 622,000 customers mere hours after officials had restored service from an early morning outage, the Secretariat of Energy said.

The power failure, coming as a heat wave ramped up electricity usage and strained the city’s power supply, knocked several substations offline, according to Edesur, an electricity company in Argentina that serves parts of Buenos Aires and its suburbs. It said its technicians were racing to restore power.

The heat index, which takes humidity into account, climbed to 42 Celsius (107.6 Fahrenheit) on Wednesday.

Municipal authorities reported that the outage suspended subway service on all lines in both directions and darkened 50 stoplights, causing chaos in central and southern Buenos Aires that forced the deployment of hundreds of traffic cops.

Later Wednesday afternoon, service resumed on all but two train lines, the capital’s subway franchisee said. Officers rescued people temporarily trapped in elevators. Pedestrians were left broiling on sidewalks downtown, unable to cross the traffic-snarled main thoroughfare of Avenida 9 de Julio.

Blackouts are relatively common in Argentina, especially in periods of peak demand, such as the height of the hot summer months in the Southern Hemisphere.

Years of effectively frozen prices for electricity under previous left-leaning administrations had led to a lack of investment in the electricity sector.

But utility rates have surged under libertarian President Javier Milei, who has also courted foreign investors to bankroll big energy infrastructure projects.