A blackout hit a large swath of Venezuela on Thursday, darkening street lights, shutting down the Caracas subway and forcing President Hugo Chavez's government to resort to temporary rationing measures. The power outage affected the capital of Caracas and 12 states stretching across the northern half of the country, Electricity Minister Ali Rodriguez said.
The state oil company said some activities were interrupted at its refineries, including units partially halted at the Jose heavy crude upgrading complex in eastern Venezuela. But it said operations were expected to be back to normal by early Friday.
A forest fire apparently caused the outage by overheating major transmission lines in western Venezuela and knocking them offline, Rodriguez said. He said that failure forced various power plants to shut down and caused a cumulative drop of about 10,000 megawatts, a large share of the country's generating capacity of roughly 24,000 megawatts. (read more)
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