Venezuela suffers second blackout within a month

The conflicts in Venezuela has escalated to the point of the country being thrown into total blackout in past few weeks.

The Venezuelan government has blamed the opposition for power outage that affected half of Venezuela, including Caracas.

The country is being hit by yet another electricity blackout, including much of the capital, Caracas, sowing alarm two weeks after a nationwide outage that paralysed the country.

The power cut in the capital occurred around 1.20pm local time (17:20 GMT) on Monday, affecting the electricity supply to the city centre.

After nightfall, many apartment buildings in the Caracas metro area – home to around six million people – were aglow again and traffic lights were back on, but people in many other states reported they were still in the dark.

President Nicolas Maduro blamed the outage on an “attack” targeting the Guri hydroelectric plant.

Communications Minister, Jorge Rodriguez, noted that the latest blackout was a result of “an attack on the charging and transmission centre” at the Guri dam, which supplies 80 percent of the power to the country of 30 million.

“What (last time) took days, now has been taken care of in just a few hours,” Rodriguez said, saying the fix had been made in “record time”, he said.

Earlier, a local newspaper reported that the power was out at Venezuela’s main international airport outside Caracas.

Mobile phone signals were disrupted and televisions were blanked out. Shops hastily lowered shutters, fearing looters.