Cuba’s electrical grid collapsed late on Tuesday, local officials said, leaving the entire country in the dark shortly after Hurricane Ian plowed through the western end of the island leaving a path of destruction in its wake.
The sprawling Category 3 hurricane was barreling north towards the Dry Tortugas, off the Florida Keys, late on Tuesday, with maximum sustained winds of 120 miles per hour (195 km per hour), the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said. Cuba’s electrical grid – decades-old and in desperate need of modernization, has been faltering for months with blackouts an everyday event across much of the island.
But officials said the storm had proven to be too much for the system, provoking a failure that shut off the lights for the island’s 11.3 million people. “The system was already operating under complex conditions with the passage of Hurricane Ian,” said Lazaro Guerra, technical director of Cuba’s Electricity Union. “There is no electricity service in any part of the country right now.”
He said the union would work through the night and into Wednesday to restore power as soon as possible. The countrywide blackout added insult to injury for exhausted Cubans.
Mayelin Suarez, a street vendor who sells ice cream in the provincial capital, called the night of the storm’s passage the “the darkest of her life.” “We almost lost the roof off our house,” Suarez told Reuters, her voice trembling. “My daughter, my husband and I tied it down with a rope to keep it from flying away.”
The hurricane hit Cuba at a time of dire economic crisis. Blackouts and long-running shortages of food, medicine and fuel are likely to complicate efforts to recover from Ian. “Ian has done away with what little we had left,” said Omar Avila, a worker at butcher shop in Pinar del Rio. “It’s a horrible disaster.” (Yahoo News)
