Power outages hard fix for Venezuela

Power outages in Venezuela appear to be a daily occurrence forcing people to follow now-familiar routines: scour neighborhoods for food in the few shops that were open or seek out the few spots where they could find a signal on their mobile phones and get in touch with family and friends.

Caracas: The collapse of the power grid was yet another setback for a country whose oil reserves made it one of Latin America's wealthiest decades ago.

Courtesy: APTN

Various video images confirm the partial destruction of the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric plant, also known as the Guri dam, due to fire at the facility, which provides most of the country's electricity.

There have also been numerous fires and explosions at various substations throughout the capital.

"How have the breakdowns occurred? Due to fires in the transmission substations," explained Winston Cabas,President of AVIEM, the Venezuelan Association of Mechanic and Electric Engineering.

"The undergrowth has grown a lot, there is a spark that causes a fire, the lines are overheated thermally, the protections in the hydroelectric plant are triggered. Those turbines are taken out of service, the other transmission line gets overheated and all the hydroelectric generation goes out of service."

Venezuela's power grid first crashed on March 7, throwing almost all of the oil-rich nation's 30 million residents into chaos.

The new outages paralyzed the nation again just as it was recovering from the first crash.

President Maduro is blaming the blackouts on a U.S.-led cyberattack targeting the Guri Dam, the main engine of Venezuela's power grid.

Experts on the Venezuelan electrical grid said images of the blaze shared by the government as well as information from engineers on the ground indicate the fire began inside one of three critical transformers near the Guri dam because equipment that facilitates an electrical current's passage was not regularly maintained.

"If PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela S.A.) was working perfectly and this government was not doing the things it's doing there would be no sanctions and PDVSA's fuel production wouldn't be in danger," said Cabas.

The new outage appeared to have affected the majority of the 23 states in Venezuela, whose steep economic decline contributed to the flight of more than 3 million people, or one-tenth of the population, to other countries as the crisis escalated.