DR1: Blackouts redux

A new wave of blackouts is hitting residents of the Dominican Republic's larger cities. Many parts of Santiago experienced 18-hour power cuts and Santo Domingo suffered two major blackouts over the weekend. This comes after a period of relatively stable energy supplies, at least for the areas where the bill payment rate is high. According to Hoy newspaper, the power outages were caused by problems in the CDEEE's transmission lines. Last Wednesday, a failure in the 169,000-volt transmission link to the Haina generation facility shut down five substations and left the areas around the Maximo Gomez and Luperon Avenues in the dark. Late on Friday most of Santo Domingo was blacked out lasting into the early hours of Saturday morning, as EdeSur reported failures in the 138,000-volt and 69,000-volt lines from Haina. These failures resulted in seven sub-stations going dark. Santiago's La Informacion newspaper reports! that the entire city is experiencing blackouts lasting between 16 and 18 hours, but the local distributor EdeNorte has not given reporters any explanation. The recent 5.8% price hike is provoking even more disgust among the clients.