Venezuela: power returns after blackout but normal service may be a long way off

• Report finds outage caused by bush fire near substation
• Parts of the country remain without electricity

Locals line up to replace empty propane gas drums in Las Minas de Baruta neighborhood, Caracas, on Thursday. Photograph: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images

Joe Parkin Daniels in Caracas @joeparkdan-Thu 14 Mar 2019 21.51 GMT

Power has been restored to much of Venezuela, a week after a devastating blackout struck across the country, crippling water supplies, and cutting off telephone and internet services for millions.

But swaths of the country remain without electricity, and experts have warned that normal services may not resume for weeks – or even months.

A new report from the Central University of Venezuela’s faculty of engineering confirmed that the blackout was caused when a bush fire near the Malena substation in eastern Venezuela took out a vital section of the country’s power grid.

The report offered two possible explanations for why the fire had such a devastating impact – both of which imply full supply will not be restored any time soon.

The first is that the fire took out part of the transmission network, which could take up to 60 days to repair.

The second scenario, would be even more severe. It posits that the fire led to a turbine failure at the El Guri hydroelectric dam, which powers 80% of the country’s electric grid. In that case, repairs could take up to three years and will depend on Venezuela’s embattled government obtaining replacement parts and qualified technicians – both long absent from Venezuela’s electrical infrastructure.

One of the worst-hit areas was Venezuela’s second largest city, Maracaibo, where the blackouts triggered a spate of violent looting in which hundreds of stores were ransacked. Electricity had still not returned to much of the city on Thursday – a week after the power was cut.

In Caracas, people were starting to count the cost of the blackout, described as the worst in Venezuela’s history. More than 300 people were detained in association with protests and looting that broke out during the outage, according to the rights group Foro Penal.

The blackout also hit the supply of drinking water across much of the country, although the water pumping systems are beginning to operate in many regions again.

The government of Nicolás Maduro has offered various explanations for the power outage – including internal sabotage, an electromagnetic pulse weapon and a cyber-attack led by the US.

On Wednesday, the communications minister, Jorge Rodríguez, said that the worst was over. “At this time, almost all the electric energy supply has been restored throughout the national territory,” he said in a televised address.

But the following day, some neighbourhoods in Caracas – which had previously been spared the worst of Venezuela’s blackouts – were still without electricity as were swaths of western Venezuela.

The nation has been mired in political crisis since January, when the opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself interim president, forming a parallel government backed by the US and 50 other democracies, while a coalition led by Russia, China, Turkey and Cuba supports Maduro.

For locals in the impoverished Pinto Salinas neighbourhood in central Caracas, the political crisis was academic. “It doesn’t matter who the president is,” said Leonardo Antonio, 50, a resident of the area who had just filled jugs of water from a nearby swimming pool. “We solve our problems ourselves, just like we always have.”

The US withdrew the last of its diplomats on Thursday, and the Stars and Stripes flag over the embassy in Caracas was taken down.

The US has also been revoking hundreds of visas from Venezuelans since Monday, many of them belonging to former diplomats and their families. On Tuesday night the state department advised US citizens residing or traveling in the country to depart. “Commercial flights remain available,” a statement read.

Washington is reportedly considering fresh financial sanctions that could prohibit Visa, Mastercard and other financial institutions from processing transactions in Venezuela.

The restrictions have been described as a way to pile pressure on the embattled president, Nicolás Maduro, but if introduced, they will inevitably create more problems for citizens who are struggling with hyper-inflation and chronic shortages of food and medicine.