The Dominican Republic was hit by a country-wide blackout on Monday, marking the second such outage in three months and raising fresh concerns over the stability of the Caribbean nation's power grid.
The failure disrupted traffic, halted public transport and forced some businesses to shut as engineers worked to restore electricity. The state-owned Dominican Electricity Transmission Company said the country's main power plants abruptly stopped supplying energy before noon, which subsequently caused all other plants to shut down.
By mid-afternoon, the grid was operating at nearly 30% of its capacity, according to Energy Minister Joel Santos. He said essential services including hospitals, drinking water systems, mass transit and airports were running on backup power.
Santos attributed the failure to a trip in a transmission line switch, which triggered the system to enter protection mode. The previous major blackout in November was blamed on human error during line maintenance work.
