7 ms·

State of emergency declared after blackout plunges most of Chile into darkness

197 points by impish9208 2y ago

MisterSandman 2y ago
A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, but I may be projecting a bit - how are people from Chile responding? I’m sure they’re not happy about the outage, but does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to them?
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  I think this is the pertinent section? > Authorities also announced a curfew in effect from 10 p.m. Tuesday until 6 a.m. Wednesday. Personally I could understand that both policing and emergency response with no light at night might just become impossible. All the streetlights are presumably out, making walking difficult. If all of the traffic lights are also not working at night, it seems extremely dangerous. And any criminal would be camouflaged by all of the chaos. Much simpler to police the very act of being outside. I agree it's not ideal, but I wouldn't thin end of the wedge it.
  - lazide 2y ago
    If there is any legitimate reason for an emergency nighttime curfew and martial law, it’s likely this would be it, yes. Chile is also relatively lightly populated, with the vast majority of its population in Santiago - which is pretty dense. If anywhere in Chile is going to have a sudden crime spree if there was an opportunity, Santiago would be pretty much it.
    - inferiorhuman 2y ago
      Counterpoint: huge swaths of the Bay Area went dark for a few days (9–11 October 2019) and we did not descend into martial law.
      - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 2y ago
        You can't post slurs here. I've (re-) banned the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        xphilter 2y ago
        [flagged]
        onetokeoverthe 2y ago
        [flagged]
      - newsclues 2y ago
        What is the difference in preparation thought? Does the Bay Area have generators, battery backup for critical emergency services like police and emergency medical care?
        bluGill 2y ago
        I don't have to live there to tell you they do. Generators are very common in the US, though they are generally placed in locations where they are easy to ignore. I expect every hospital has them, as will your water department, natural gas utility, cell phone towers (hit and miss, many don't have them, many do), any business with a data center on site (the generator might not cover the rest of the building, but the data center and HVAC will be on it). In many locations your utility will give a substantial discount to power if you have a backup generator and will allow your utility to switch you to running only on the generator when power demand is high. It that is the case nearly every business will have a generator - it is almost paid for off the discounts and so the ability to run normally when the power is out makes it worth it. In Mississippi I saw generators on 20 foot poles so they would keep operating even when a hurricane flooded the whole region (they probably went in after the hurricane where it would have been needed...). I wouldn't expect that in the Bay area, but it it shows what is considered normal in places that have earned a reputation as backward. I know Chile is not the richest country, but my impression is they are good enough that I'd expect generators in all the important places at least. Though still power off will turn the city dark overall.
    - anjel 2y ago
      Or NYC 1977
    - mrbungie 2y ago
      Yep. The 2010 Chilean earthquake and tsunami[1] is an example of what can happen in this country during catastrophes: sacking and looting. Since then night curfews are a given during and after disasters. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake
- nobodyandproud 2y ago
  This is executive powers as it was intended, though, and not a power grab.
  - newsclues 2y ago
    I think generally you must confirm that there was no power grab after the emergency has pasted. Otherwise you can grab power and refuse to relinquish it after a real emergency that justified the executive powers.
    - aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
      That is true but it seems like most authoritarians invent a vague emergency to justify grabbing specific powers (e.g. Trump declaring a "border emergency"), whereas a specific emergency for a specific event has a time limit. In particular: getting Trump to rescind his border "emergency" will be a long slow process of organizing and accumulating public pressure, whereas there will be an overwhelming amount of public pressure to end the curfew as soon as the power is restored.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- nkrisc 2y ago
  If there were ever reason for a curfew, this seems to be a textbook example of when it is warranted.
- DanielVZ 2y ago
  This is common standard procedure during region-wide emergencies. Everyone sees it as reasonable as far as I know due to crime being common during emergencies. We are at an all time high perception of crime. I myself have been victim of two car hijacks this year, and know plenty of victims in my already small social circle. If my only loss of freedom is going out during the night (you still can do it for short trips by filling a form), I think it’s worth it.
  - sieabahlpark 2y ago
    [dead]
- dataviz1000 2y ago
  On a scale from 0 to Augusto Pinochet bringing American "Freedom" to the people or his next door neighbor, Videla, throwing dissidents out of airplanes, the current government declaring a curfew during darkness is about a 0. Luckily, I flew out of Chile on Saturday. Although it felt like it was the safest place I have visited in South America so far the empty white powdered dime bags on the sidewalk, people telling me to be very careful walking alone at night, razor wire and electrified fences around properties was a reminder of how dangerous it is.
  - eitally 2y ago
    I have a very close friend who's Chilean but grew up in Brasil after his family immigrated to escape Pinochet. Overall, Chile is exceptionally safe by South American standards, especially outside Santiago (which has all the perks and challenges of any large city).
    - bigtimesink 2y ago
      How's Paraguay? I'm told it's one of the safest places in South America outside France, and safer than Chile.
      - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        ? All of South America is outside France. Did you mean to type something else?
        dragonwriter 2y ago
        Guyane (“French Guiana”) is “outside France” in the same way that Alaska is “outside the United States”. Most of France is in Europe, but most is different than all.
        chmod775 2y ago
        By area, only about 80% of France is in Europe!
      - 2y ago
- boomboomsubban 2y ago
  Even ignoring crime, a curfew probably helps the health care and firefighting sectors significantly. I can easily imagine my friend group using a blackout as an excuse for a drunken bonfire.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    So long as there is enough space to safely have a bonfire (no burning down the neighbor's house or starting a forest fire), and nobody gets so drunk they need medical care there is nothing wrong with a drunken bonfire. Or you can put away the alcohol and have a kid friendly bonfire - they are just as much fun. Of course many drunken bonfires end up needing health care and/or firefighting. However they need not. How do you fix your friends?
    - CJefferson 2y ago
      All bonfires have risks, so banning them during a complete blackout really doesn’t seem unreasonable. If you do have an accident, don’t expect an ambulance to come.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        Why wouldn't an ambulance come? My experience (this is US) is I expect the local emergency phone numbers to work and the ambulance to come. A bonfire is what I want people doing. they have fun and with some care is safe enough. They can enjoy the power outage instead of complain about how awful life is.
        sieabahlpark 2y ago
        [dead]
        toast0 2y ago
        My local experience with blackouts is cell towers become unusable after 4-6 hours; if the outage started in the middle of the night, sometimes things work a little longer, until everyone wakes up. Emergency calls have priority and can attach to any network, so maybe they would work, but not if all the cell towers are totally offline. Certainly some towers may have onsite generators with fuel set to automatically run, but not the ones around me, and I've had two multiday outages this winter. Landlines should work, but I don't know if Chile has many of them. I know they're rare here in Washington State. Wired internet is a maybe, depending on provider choices.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  The bad thing is the sudden change in a resource that the people are dependent on. There's absolutely nothing bad about imposing a curfew during this emergency.
- marcinzm 2y ago
  > A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, As I see it, in a well running society there is enough trust to give everyone flexibility in the short term. If everyone assumes worst intentions and outcomes then your society is effectively no longer functioning. At which point a curfew is the least of your worries.
- mrbungie 2y ago
  Chilean here. The curfew was very reasonable due to the scale of the outage initially affecting the ~99.0% of homes, and its the purpose was just to reduce circulation due to restricted policing capacity and the inherent danger of big cities such as Santiago being completely out of energy and artificial light at night. Plus, both natural persons and enterprises could ask for curfew passes via a website (Comisaria Virtual) created during the COVID-era for doing police paperwork online. Military/police staff were especially understanding and people who didn't have a pass when checked were allowed to get one on-site using their smartphones. It was as soft as a curfew can get. I didn't see any important backlash on social networks if that says anything to you.
  - ipython 2y ago
    How did the smartphone based pass system work if - as tfa states - telecommunication infrastructure was also non functional?
    - mrbungie 2y ago
      Most telco and central gov. tech infra was actually working, unstable, but working during the first hours of the outage. I know some friends eventually lost connectivity in remote parts of the country though (for 2-3 hours at most). For the average chilean: As long as you had 4G-5G equipment with working batteries, you had internet and access to essential gov services.
      - aeyes 2y ago
        That's not true. At 7pm local time cellular service in Santiago was pretty much dead. Most antennas only have backup power for 4 hours.
        mrbungie 2y ago
        I had (unstable) cellular service all the way through, and chatted with other people too. Probably commune/zone-related.
      - 2y ago
- fwn 2y ago
  > A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing[...] does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to [Chileans]? This comment doesn't seem to have gone down well with the community, but I wonder why. "Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored. My parents have a place in the German countryside and they are practically self-sufficient in terms of energy. I would definitely want to take the opportunity to visit them, catch up with them, use the time in a socially productive way, etc. I have done countless treks, even for weeks at a time, without having to depend on continuous electricity. Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid? Imagine doing rolling curfews in countries like South-Africa synced with rolling blackouts - just because some vague and hand-wavy "oh so dangerous". Sounds surreal.
  - rafram 2y ago
    > Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid? Because that genuinely is dangerous? Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down?
    - fwn 2y ago
      > Because that genuinely is dangerous? Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down? A rise in the likelihood of crime is a gradual, probabilistic matter, whereas a curfew is an absolute, binary restriction on freedoms. (Although in this particular case, fortunately, it seems to be quite lax.) If power outages were a sufficient justification for curfews, we would need clear, documented evidence of the crime increase, measured against other contributing factors, and balanced with the fundamental rights being restricted. In Germany, for example, crime (and hospitalization) spikes on New Year's Eve—yet no one seriously argues for a curfew every December 31st. The mere presence of an increased risk does not automatically override the need for a proportional response. Otherwise, any statistical uptick in crime could be used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties without proper consideration of competing rights and interests. None of this is new knowledge.
- volkl48 2y ago
  Curfews are commonly imposed during/immediately after major disasters in any significantly populated area, pretty much anywhere I have ever heard of in the world. It's certainly the case in both the US + Europe in my experience.
- OfficeChad 2y ago
  [dead]
lenerdenator 2y ago
Consider this your reminder to swing by the home improvement store and buy that backup generator you've been thinking about getting for a while. Gonna be a lot of discarded food in Chile over the next few days...
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  Or a lot of impromptu parties...
  - ourmandave 2y ago
    By candle light.
- BLubliulu 2y ago
  Get an EV instead. Use it for bi-directional charging, buy PV to reduce your dependency and energy bill and a heat pump to be independent of oil/gas companies.
  - officialchicken 2y ago
    That's a terrible suggestion. A car is 20x the price of a generator while and at least 10x larger. A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc. A car is a transportation device, not a stationary energy generation machine designed as a backup in case of power failure.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      > A car can't power an entire household for days on end This is underestimating the ludicrous amount of power an EV's batteries have. You can absolutely power your house for days on end using one. (Of course, that should also give us pause to think about what it means that we spend so much energy for transportation compared to household necessities.) And gasoline has plenty of problems too, like its extremely short shelf-life.
appleorchard46 2y ago
I don't know the first thing about electric infrastructure, but for there to be a single point of failure like this just seems bonkers. I suppose the country's shape is partially to blame. I wonder what could have caused this.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Are you old enough to remember the great northeast blackout of 2003? A single software bug brought the whole grid down for 55 million people and we didn't have power fully restored here in southern Ontario until 3 days later. It was nice to see the stars though.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    just gave me a good ambiance idea for a fiction, ty
    - PotatoNinja 2y ago
      https://www.amazon.com/Blackout-heart-stopping-techno-thriller-Marc-Elsberg-ebook/dp/B01MYDPTLR https://www.amazon.com/Blackout-heart-stopping-techno-thrill...
      - greenie_beans 2y ago
        nope nothing like that at all, like so far away from what i'm thinking. i'm writing what i'm calling "the walking book" about a guy and his dog walking everyday over a lifetime, where the tension of the plot is about all the things that happen throughout all of the different walks
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    It wasn't a single software bug. Broadly, what happened was this: * A power company failed to trim trees from its power lines properly. Four of their major transmission lines failed in one afternoon due to shorting out via tree. * The software bug you mentioned caused a failure to alarm the power company of two of their line failures. The first and fourth failures were alarmed in real time. * A separate issue rendered the regional grid operator's software modeling real-time grid instability inoperable for most of the afternoon. Crucially, if this had been running, the operator would have realized that the failure of one more line would have created grid instability requiring immediate action. * The final line trip set off a cascade of overloads trips until Sammis-Star overloads and trips. This takes about 15 minutes, and analysis suggests that the Sammis-Star trip is when the blackout became inevitable. * Sammis-Star triggers lines to fail one-by-one from east to west, until it severed every line in Ohio and Michigan. This causes a large power surge to go from Michigan through southern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Ontario, back into Michigan and then into the final demand of Cleveland. * Essentially every link along this spiral fails in the course of a few seconds, creating several grid islands. Whether these grid islands black out is dependent on the local mismatch between generation and consumption. (Full story from https://web.archive.org/web/20120318081212/http://www.nerc.com/docs/docs/blackout/NERC_Final_Blackout_Report_07_13_04.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120318081212/http://www.nerc.c...).
TZubiri 2y ago
Simultaneously Argentina is like: "There's too much bureocracy in customs for electrical imports, make it laxer, also no restriction on plug types
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Well, no country-wide black outs so far.
  - polsaker 2y ago
    We had one in 2018 tho :-)
- eric__cartman 2y ago
  Honestly I don't see much of a problem if this is applied to imports of single items by an end user. I used to be that I had trouble importing some device partly because the power supply was not certified by the local regulatory entities. Most of what people import in single quantities are electronics with switch mode power supplies that work from 100-240v and at 50/60hz. I doubt many people are importing a hairdryer or a toaster. Personally if a power supply is approved by the FCC or some other important entity I consider it good enough for my personal use, even if it has a foreign plug. It is a problem for importing large quantities to resell though, I'm not defending the ability to import 100s of death traps and sell them to people.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    As I understand it, the most frequent type of importation by item is wholesale, we can be talking about the import of 500k phone chargers. I think plug types are not a great risk as users will usually not want that. But in my head the risk is that we import 500k of something that technically works, but is off spec by 10V or 10hz, or the tolerance specs are too wide or too small. It's obvious how too small of a tolerance can cause issues, but too wide isn't ideal either, as there's tradeoffs, you end up importing swiss knife products. Which makes sense for big expensive electronics, but stuff like phone chargers? Subterranean or aerial cabling? The task of verifying the quality of something is distinct from the task of verifying that it conforms to the local standards. And I wouldn't put it past the cargo culting governments to figure that if it's good enough for the US it's good enough for us.
webdoodle 2y ago
I'm sure the solar proton storm that hit right as Chile was sun facing had nothing to do with it. /s https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=25&month=02&year=2025 https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=25&month=02&... FYI - The 3rd worlds power grid, mostly near the equator isn't as resilient to solar storms as the U.S. and other nations in the Northern Hemisphere who've had to harden there grids against such things due to repeated solar incidents. Often because they have no redundancy when a line surges.
- qwertox 2y ago
  [flagged]
- bigtimesink 2y ago
  Chile is further south than you think and more developed than you think. Unlike most of Latin America, the tap water in Chile is generally safe to drink, so their electric grid might also be better than you expect.
CSMastermind 2y ago
Does anyone know what the root cause is?
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  The transmission company that triggered this claims a safety mechanism misfired, taking down the main and backup lines. After this 200km section shut down it triggered cascading failures. I heard on the radio that one substation exploded, but didn't find news about it[^1]. Power was partially restored within 44 minutes, but it was more like 2-6hrs before it was back and stable depending on the area. --- I'm not too mad at the initial outage, this kind of thing happens, but I'm ashamed of how many emergency contingencies didn't work great. In Chile we kind of expect a natural disaster to take down power or communications in a large area without much warning due to earthquakes. For instance power is meant to go down locally after a ~7 M_{W} earthquake as a safety feature, so it's going to go down even if it's no one's fault, but the protocols and safety nets didn't work great. Traffic was a mess in cities, particularly Santiago which heavily relies on the subway to get people around, some critical infrastructure had no backup power (Mobile antennas, few Hospitals). Some people reacted poorly IMO, many went to fill up their gas tanks when it made absolutely no sense to me. I guess we really need solar to spread more so people don't even think about using their cars to charge their phones. I'm also annoyed that most modern cellphones have no AM/FM receivers. Mobile coverage and networks are good, but they stands no chance if everyone suddenly tries to use them. [^1]: I guess a mix of a power surge together with high temperatures triggered this. I've seen a small transformer explode as it got shorted and light up the cooling oil.
tqi 2y ago
Going to be some incredible long exposure night photography in urban areas that comes out of this
xenadu02 2y ago
Generators must synchronize with the grid. Huge spinning rotor masses that will experience tremendous forces to coerce them into matching an RPM that corresponds to the grid's frequency. Frequency is also impacted by load: the greater the load on the generator the more torque required at its input shaft to maintain the same RPM. If the generator's input engine is already at max torque then RPM must decrease all else equal. That in turn requires that every other generator on the grid also slow down to match. When a huge chunk of generating capacity disappears there isn't enough power feeding the remaining generator input shafts (all else equal) to maintain RPM so the grid frequency must drop. That tends to destroy customer equipment among other problems. Generators are motors and motors are generators. If the capacity disappears too quickly the grid _drives the generator as a motor_ potentially with megawatts of capacity all trying to instantly make that 100 ton rotor change from 3600 RPM to 2800 RPM or whatever. Inertia puts its $0.02 and the net result is a disintegrating rotor slinging molten metal and chunks of itself out while the bearings turn into dust. Protective equipment sees this happening and trips the generator offline to protect it. Usually the coordinating grid entity keeps spare capacity available at all times to respond to loss of other capacity or demand changes. This is also the point of "load shedding": if spare capacity drops below a set level loads are turned off. If spare capacity is not maintained or transmission line choke points present problems then capacity trip outs can cause progressive collapse as each generator sees excessive load, trips, and in turn pushes excess load to the next generator. If your grid control systems are well designed they can detect this from a central location and command parts of the grid to "island" into balanced chunks of load/capacity so the entire grid does not fully collapse. Of course when you want to reconnect the islands it takes careful shifting of frequency to get them aligned before you can do that. If all generators collapse you end up in a black start situation that requires careful staging lest more load than you expected jumps on the grid (maybe due to control devices being unpowered or stuck somewhere), triggering a secondary collapse. Caveat: not a grid engineer so I may have gotten some of this wrong but hopefully it helps anyone who wonders why load shedding exists or how a grid can "collapse" and what the consequences are if you don't do those things and just let it ride.
- raggles 2y ago
  Am grid engineer. You nailed it. It can get incredibly complex modelling this stuff, and reading all the armchair observers banging on about 'single points of failure' is amusing.
uzbit 2y ago
I was in Santiago when this happened. While working in the basement of my hostel, all the power went out, and it was pitch black. I didn't really think much of it at the time because there had been several minutes-long outages before in various places in Santiago/Chile. When I got upstairs, I noticed that I had no cellular coverage, nor did anyone else, which is when I realized that this one was different. Took about 7hrs to get the power back on in my part of town. It's very interesting when there is ZERO internet or any other form of external communication. In hind-sight I'd say it was an interesting short simulation for the zombie apocalypse.

197 points by impish9208 2y ago

A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, but I may be projecting a bit - how are people from Chile responding? I’m sure they’re not happy about the outage, but does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to them?

robertlagrant 2y ago
I think this is the pertinent section? > Authorities also announced a curfew in effect from 10 p.m. Tuesday until 6 a.m. Wednesday. Personally I could understand that both policing and emergency response with no light at night might just become impossible. All the streetlights are presumably out, making walking difficult. If all of the traffic lights are also not working at night, it seems extremely dangerous. And any criminal would be camouflaged by all of the chaos. Much simpler to police the very act of being outside. I agree it's not ideal, but I wouldn't thin end of the wedge it.
- lazide 2y ago
  If there is any legitimate reason for an emergency nighttime curfew and martial law, it’s likely this would be it, yes. Chile is also relatively lightly populated, with the vast majority of its population in Santiago - which is pretty dense. If anywhere in Chile is going to have a sudden crime spree if there was an opportunity, Santiago would be pretty much it.
  - inferiorhuman 2y ago
    Counterpoint: huge swaths of the Bay Area went dark for a few days (9–11 October 2019) and we did not descend into martial law.
    - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 2y ago
        You can't post slurs here. I've (re-) banned the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - xphilter 2y ago
        [flagged]
        onetokeoverthe 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - newsclues 2y ago
      What is the difference in preparation thought? Does the Bay Area have generators, battery backup for critical emergency services like police and emergency medical care?
      - bluGill 2y ago
        I don't have to live there to tell you they do. Generators are very common in the US, though they are generally placed in locations where they are easy to ignore. I expect every hospital has them, as will your water department, natural gas utility, cell phone towers (hit and miss, many don't have them, many do), any business with a data center on site (the generator might not cover the rest of the building, but the data center and HVAC will be on it). In many locations your utility will give a substantial discount to power if you have a backup generator and will allow your utility to switch you to running only on the generator when power demand is high. It that is the case nearly every business will have a generator - it is almost paid for off the discounts and so the ability to run normally when the power is out makes it worth it. In Mississippi I saw generators on 20 foot poles so they would keep operating even when a hurricane flooded the whole region (they probably went in after the hurricane where it would have been needed...). I wouldn't expect that in the Bay area, but it it shows what is considered normal in places that have earned a reputation as backward. I know Chile is not the richest country, but my impression is they are good enough that I'd expect generators in all the important places at least. Though still power off will turn the city dark overall.
  - anjel 2y ago
    Or NYC 1977
  - mrbungie 2y ago
    Yep. The 2010 Chilean earthquake and tsunami[1] is an example of what can happen in this country during catastrophes: sacking and looting. Since then night curfews are a given during and after disasters. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake
nobodyandproud 2y ago
This is executive powers as it was intended, though, and not a power grab.
- newsclues 2y ago
  I think generally you must confirm that there was no power grab after the emergency has pasted. Otherwise you can grab power and refuse to relinquish it after a real emergency that justified the executive powers.
  - aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
    That is true but it seems like most authoritarians invent a vague emergency to justify grabbing specific powers (e.g. Trump declaring a "border emergency"), whereas a specific emergency for a specific event has a time limit. In particular: getting Trump to rescind his border "emergency" will be a long slow process of organizing and accumulating public pressure, whereas there will be an overwhelming amount of public pressure to end the curfew as soon as the power is restored.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
nkrisc 2y ago
If there were ever reason for a curfew, this seems to be a textbook example of when it is warranted.
DanielVZ 2y ago
This is common standard procedure during region-wide emergencies. Everyone sees it as reasonable as far as I know due to crime being common during emergencies. We are at an all time high perception of crime. I myself have been victim of two car hijacks this year, and know plenty of victims in my already small social circle. If my only loss of freedom is going out during the night (you still can do it for short trips by filling a form), I think it’s worth it.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  [dead]
dataviz1000 2y ago
On a scale from 0 to Augusto Pinochet bringing American "Freedom" to the people or his next door neighbor, Videla, throwing dissidents out of airplanes, the current government declaring a curfew during darkness is about a 0. Luckily, I flew out of Chile on Saturday. Although it felt like it was the safest place I have visited in South America so far the empty white powdered dime bags on the sidewalk, people telling me to be very careful walking alone at night, razor wire and electrified fences around properties was a reminder of how dangerous it is.
- eitally 2y ago
  I have a very close friend who's Chilean but grew up in Brasil after his family immigrated to escape Pinochet. Overall, Chile is exceptionally safe by South American standards, especially outside Santiago (which has all the perks and challenges of any large city).
  - bigtimesink 2y ago
    How's Paraguay? I'm told it's one of the safest places in South America outside France, and safer than Chile.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      ? All of South America is outside France. Did you mean to type something else?
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        Guyane (“French Guiana”) is “outside France” in the same way that Alaska is “outside the United States”. Most of France is in Europe, but most is different than all.
      - chmod775 2y ago
        By area, only about 80% of France is in Europe!
    - 2y ago
boomboomsubban 2y ago
Even ignoring crime, a curfew probably helps the health care and firefighting sectors significantly. I can easily imagine my friend group using a blackout as an excuse for a drunken bonfire.
- bluGill 2y ago
  So long as there is enough space to safely have a bonfire (no burning down the neighbor's house or starting a forest fire), and nobody gets so drunk they need medical care there is nothing wrong with a drunken bonfire. Or you can put away the alcohol and have a kid friendly bonfire - they are just as much fun. Of course many drunken bonfires end up needing health care and/or firefighting. However they need not. How do you fix your friends?
  - CJefferson 2y ago
    All bonfires have risks, so banning them during a complete blackout really doesn’t seem unreasonable. If you do have an accident, don’t expect an ambulance to come.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Why wouldn't an ambulance come? My experience (this is US) is I expect the local emergency phone numbers to work and the ambulance to come. A bonfire is what I want people doing. they have fun and with some care is safe enough. They can enjoy the power outage instead of complain about how awful life is.
      - sieabahlpark 2y ago
        [dead]
      - toast0 2y ago
        My local experience with blackouts is cell towers become unusable after 4-6 hours; if the outage started in the middle of the night, sometimes things work a little longer, until everyone wakes up. Emergency calls have priority and can attach to any network, so maybe they would work, but not if all the cell towers are totally offline. Certainly some towers may have onsite generators with fuel set to automatically run, but not the ones around me, and I've had two multiday outages this winter. Landlines should work, but I don't know if Chile has many of them. I know they're rare here in Washington State. Wired internet is a maybe, depending on provider choices.
ericjmorey 2y ago
The bad thing is the sudden change in a resource that the people are dependent on. There's absolutely nothing bad about imposing a curfew during this emergency.
marcinzm 2y ago
> A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, As I see it, in a well running society there is enough trust to give everyone flexibility in the short term. If everyone assumes worst intentions and outcomes then your society is effectively no longer functioning. At which point a curfew is the least of your worries.
mrbungie 2y ago
Chilean here. The curfew was very reasonable due to the scale of the outage initially affecting the ~99.0% of homes, and its the purpose was just to reduce circulation due to restricted policing capacity and the inherent danger of big cities such as Santiago being completely out of energy and artificial light at night. Plus, both natural persons and enterprises could ask for curfew passes via a website (Comisaria Virtual) created during the COVID-era for doing police paperwork online. Military/police staff were especially understanding and people who didn't have a pass when checked were allowed to get one on-site using their smartphones. It was as soft as a curfew can get. I didn't see any important backlash on social networks if that says anything to you.
- ipython 2y ago
  How did the smartphone based pass system work if - as tfa states - telecommunication infrastructure was also non functional?
  - mrbungie 2y ago
    Most telco and central gov. tech infra was actually working, unstable, but working during the first hours of the outage. I know some friends eventually lost connectivity in remote parts of the country though (for 2-3 hours at most). For the average chilean: As long as you had 4G-5G equipment with working batteries, you had internet and access to essential gov services.
    - aeyes 2y ago
      That's not true. At 7pm local time cellular service in Santiago was pretty much dead. Most antennas only have backup power for 4 hours.
      - mrbungie 2y ago
        I had (unstable) cellular service all the way through, and chatted with other people too. Probably commune/zone-related.
    - 2y ago
fwn 2y ago
> A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing[...] does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to [Chileans]? This comment doesn't seem to have gone down well with the community, but I wonder why. "Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored. My parents have a place in the German countryside and they are practically self-sufficient in terms of energy. I would definitely want to take the opportunity to visit them, catch up with them, use the time in a socially productive way, etc. I have done countless treks, even for weeks at a time, without having to depend on continuous electricity. Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid? Imagine doing rolling curfews in countries like South-Africa synced with rolling blackouts - just because some vague and hand-wavy "oh so dangerous". Sounds surreal.
- rafram 2y ago
  > Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid? Because that genuinely is dangerous? Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down?
  - fwn 2y ago
    > Because that genuinely is dangerous? Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down? A rise in the likelihood of crime is a gradual, probabilistic matter, whereas a curfew is an absolute, binary restriction on freedoms. (Although in this particular case, fortunately, it seems to be quite lax.) If power outages were a sufficient justification for curfews, we would need clear, documented evidence of the crime increase, measured against other contributing factors, and balanced with the fundamental rights being restricted. In Germany, for example, crime (and hospitalization) spikes on New Year's Eve—yet no one seriously argues for a curfew every December 31st. The mere presence of an increased risk does not automatically override the need for a proportional response. Otherwise, any statistical uptick in crime could be used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties without proper consideration of competing rights and interests. None of this is new knowledge.
volkl48 2y ago
Curfews are commonly imposed during/immediately after major disasters in any significantly populated area, pretty much anywhere I have ever heard of in the world. It's certainly the case in both the US + Europe in my experience.
OfficeChad 2y ago
[dead]

lenerdenator 2y ago

Consider this your reminder to swing by the home improvement store and buy that backup generator you've been thinking about getting for a while. Gonna be a lot of discarded food in Chile over the next few days...

noisy_boy 2y ago
Or a lot of impromptu parties...
- ourmandave 2y ago
  By candle light.
BLubliulu 2y ago
Get an EV instead. Use it for bi-directional charging, buy PV to reduce your dependency and energy bill and a heat pump to be independent of oil/gas companies.
- officialchicken 2y ago
  That's a terrible suggestion. A car is 20x the price of a generator while and at least 10x larger. A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc. A car is a transportation device, not a stationary energy generation machine designed as a backup in case of power failure.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    > A car can't power an entire household for days on end This is underestimating the ludicrous amount of power an EV's batteries have. You can absolutely power your house for days on end using one. (Of course, that should also give us pause to think about what it means that we spend so much energy for transportation compared to household necessities.) And gasoline has plenty of problems too, like its extremely short shelf-life.

appleorchard46 2y ago

I don't know the first thing about electric infrastructure, but for there to be a single point of failure like this just seems bonkers. I suppose the country's shape is partially to blame. I wonder what could have caused this.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Are you old enough to remember the great northeast blackout of 2003? A single software bug brought the whole grid down for 55 million people and we didn't have power fully restored here in southern Ontario until 3 days later. It was nice to see the stars though.
- greenie_beans 2y ago
  just gave me a good ambiance idea for a fiction, ty
  - PotatoNinja 2y ago
    https://www.amazon.com/Blackout-heart-stopping-techno-thriller-Marc-Elsberg-ebook/dp/B01MYDPTLR https://www.amazon.com/Blackout-heart-stopping-techno-thrill...
    - greenie_beans 2y ago
      nope nothing like that at all, like so far away from what i'm thinking. i'm writing what i'm calling "the walking book" about a guy and his dog walking everyday over a lifetime, where the tension of the plot is about all the things that happen throughout all of the different walks
- jcranmer 2y ago
  It wasn't a single software bug. Broadly, what happened was this: * A power company failed to trim trees from its power lines properly. Four of their major transmission lines failed in one afternoon due to shorting out via tree. * The software bug you mentioned caused a failure to alarm the power company of two of their line failures. The first and fourth failures were alarmed in real time. * A separate issue rendered the regional grid operator's software modeling real-time grid instability inoperable for most of the afternoon. Crucially, if this had been running, the operator would have realized that the failure of one more line would have created grid instability requiring immediate action. * The final line trip set off a cascade of overloads trips until Sammis-Star overloads and trips. This takes about 15 minutes, and analysis suggests that the Sammis-Star trip is when the blackout became inevitable. * Sammis-Star triggers lines to fail one-by-one from east to west, until it severed every line in Ohio and Michigan. This causes a large power surge to go from Michigan through southern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Ontario, back into Michigan and then into the final demand of Cleveland. * Essentially every link along this spiral fails in the course of a few seconds, creating several grid islands. Whether these grid islands black out is dependent on the local mismatch between generation and consumption. (Full story from https://web.archive.org/web/20120318081212/http://www.nerc.com/docs/docs/blackout/NERC_Final_Blackout_Report_07_13_04.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120318081212/http://www.nerc.c...).

TZubiri 2y ago

Simultaneously Argentina is like: "There's too much bureocracy in customs for electrical imports, make it laxer, also no restriction on plug types

IncreasePosts 2y ago
Well, no country-wide black outs so far.
- polsaker 2y ago
  We had one in 2018 tho :-)
eric__cartman 2y ago
Honestly I don't see much of a problem if this is applied to imports of single items by an end user. I used to be that I had trouble importing some device partly because the power supply was not certified by the local regulatory entities. Most of what people import in single quantities are electronics with switch mode power supplies that work from 100-240v and at 50/60hz. I doubt many people are importing a hairdryer or a toaster. Personally if a power supply is approved by the FCC or some other important entity I consider it good enough for my personal use, even if it has a foreign plug. It is a problem for importing large quantities to resell though, I'm not defending the ability to import 100s of death traps and sell them to people.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  As I understand it, the most frequent type of importation by item is wholesale, we can be talking about the import of 500k phone chargers. I think plug types are not a great risk as users will usually not want that. But in my head the risk is that we import 500k of something that technically works, but is off spec by 10V or 10hz, or the tolerance specs are too wide or too small. It's obvious how too small of a tolerance can cause issues, but too wide isn't ideal either, as there's tradeoffs, you end up importing swiss knife products. Which makes sense for big expensive electronics, but stuff like phone chargers? Subterranean or aerial cabling? The task of verifying the quality of something is distinct from the task of verifying that it conforms to the local standards. And I wouldn't put it past the cargo culting governments to figure that if it's good enough for the US it's good enough for us.

webdoodle 2y ago

I'm sure the solar proton storm that hit right as Chile was sun facing had nothing to do with it. /s https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=25&month=02&year=2025 https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=25&month=02&... FYI - The 3rd worlds power grid, mostly near the equator isn't as resilient to solar storms as the U.S. and other nations in the Northern Hemisphere who've had to harden there grids against such things due to repeated solar incidents. Often because they have no redundancy when a line surges.

qwertox 2y ago
[flagged]
bigtimesink 2y ago
Chile is further south than you think and more developed than you think. Unlike most of Latin America, the tap water in Chile is generally safe to drink, so their electric grid might also be better than you expect.

CSMastermind 2y ago

Does anyone know what the root cause is?

dietr1ch 2y ago
The transmission company that triggered this claims a safety mechanism misfired, taking down the main and backup lines. After this 200km section shut down it triggered cascading failures. I heard on the radio that one substation exploded, but didn't find news about it[^1]. Power was partially restored within 44 minutes, but it was more like 2-6hrs before it was back and stable depending on the area. --- I'm not too mad at the initial outage, this kind of thing happens, but I'm ashamed of how many emergency contingencies didn't work great. In Chile we kind of expect a natural disaster to take down power or communications in a large area without much warning due to earthquakes. For instance power is meant to go down locally after a ~7 M_{W} earthquake as a safety feature, so it's going to go down even if it's no one's fault, but the protocols and safety nets didn't work great. Traffic was a mess in cities, particularly Santiago which heavily relies on the subway to get people around, some critical infrastructure had no backup power (Mobile antennas, few Hospitals). Some people reacted poorly IMO, many went to fill up their gas tanks when it made absolutely no sense to me. I guess we really need solar to spread more so people don't even think about using their cars to charge their phones. I'm also annoyed that most modern cellphones have no AM/FM receivers. Mobile coverage and networks are good, but they stands no chance if everyone suddenly tries to use them. [^1]: I guess a mix of a power surge together with high temperatures triggered this. I've seen a small transformer explode as it got shorted and light up the cooling oil.

tqi 2y ago

Going to be some incredible long exposure night photography in urban areas that comes out of this

xenadu02 2y ago

Generators must synchronize with the grid. Huge spinning rotor masses that will experience tremendous forces to coerce them into matching an RPM that corresponds to the grid's frequency. Frequency is also impacted by load: the greater the load on the generator the more torque required at its input shaft to maintain the same RPM. If the generator's input engine is already at max torque then RPM must decrease all else equal. That in turn requires that every other generator on the grid also slow down to match. When a huge chunk of generating capacity disappears there isn't enough power feeding the remaining generator input shafts (all else equal) to maintain RPM so the grid frequency must drop. That tends to destroy customer equipment among other problems. Generators are motors and motors are generators. If the capacity disappears too quickly the grid _drives the generator as a motor_ potentially with megawatts of capacity all trying to instantly make that 100 ton rotor change from 3600 RPM to 2800 RPM or whatever. Inertia puts its $0.02 and the net result is a disintegrating rotor slinging molten metal and chunks of itself out while the bearings turn into dust. Protective equipment sees this happening and trips the generator offline to protect it. Usually the coordinating grid entity keeps spare capacity available at all times to respond to loss of other capacity or demand changes. This is also the point of "load shedding": if spare capacity drops below a set level loads are turned off. If spare capacity is not maintained or transmission line choke points present problems then capacity trip outs can cause progressive collapse as each generator sees excessive load, trips, and in turn pushes excess load to the next generator. If your grid control systems are well designed they can detect this from a central location and command parts of the grid to "island" into balanced chunks of load/capacity so the entire grid does not fully collapse. Of course when you want to reconnect the islands it takes careful shifting of frequency to get them aligned before you can do that. If all generators collapse you end up in a black start situation that requires careful staging lest more load than you expected jumps on the grid (maybe due to control devices being unpowered or stuck somewhere), triggering a secondary collapse. Caveat: not a grid engineer so I may have gotten some of this wrong but hopefully it helps anyone who wonders why load shedding exists or how a grid can "collapse" and what the consequences are if you don't do those things and just let it ride.

raggles 2y ago
Am grid engineer. You nailed it. It can get incredibly complex modelling this stuff, and reading all the armchair observers banging on about 'single points of failure' is amusing.

uzbit 2y ago

I was in Santiago when this happened. While working in the basement of my hostel, all the power went out, and it was pitch black. I didn't really think much of it at the time because there had been several minutes-long outages before in various places in Santiago/Chile. When I got upstairs, I noticed that I had no cellular coverage, nor did anyone else, which is when I realized that this one was different. Took about 7hrs to get the power back on in my part of town. It's very interesting when there is ZERO internet or any other form of external communication. In hind-sight I'd say it was an interesting short simulation for the zombie apocalypse.