Chile suffered an expansive electricity blackout Tuesday, February 25, that forced the evacuation of the Santiago metro and slowed traffic to a crawl, authorities reported.
The rare outage started at 3:16 pm and stretched all the way from Arica in the long, narrow South American country's north to Los Lagos in the south, according to the SENAPRED disaster response agency.
The government ruled out an attack or sabotage as the reason for the power loss in the middle of the southern hemisphere summer, saying a system failure was more likely to blame.
No emergency situations were reported in the hours immediately after the outage, the SENAPRED said.
The Chilevision broadcaster showed video of people trapped on a mechanical ride several meters high at an amusement park in the capital.
Chile, a country of some 20 million people, boasts one of the best power networks in the region, and has not had a blackout this big in about 15 years.
In the capital of seven million people, hundreds were evacuated from the metro.
"They let us leave work because of the power cut, but now I don't know how we will get home because all the buses are full," worker Maria Angelica Roman, 45, told AFP in Santiago.
The metro company that transports 2.3 million passengers every day, said teams were deployed to all stations "to support safe evacuations." "Once this process is completed, the stations will remain closed until power is restored," it added in a statement.
In 2010, damage to a power plant in southern Chile plunged hundreds of thousands of people into darkness for several hours.
The outage happened a month after a massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake killed more than 500 people and rocked the national power grid.
Interior Minister Carolina Toha said of the latest outage Tuesday that there was "no reason to assume that this is an attack." It was more likely "a failure in the system's operation," she told reporters, adding the grid should be back online "in the coming hours."
The country's hospital system and prisons were operating on emergency generators.
Confusion reigned in the capital and elsewhere, with businesses shuttered and transport severely disrupted.
"The police is managing traffic because there are major traffic jams on streets that are usually not busy," Anadriel Hernandez, a 20-year-old student, told AFP by telephone from Valparaiso, some 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Santiago.