When half a continent lost power
Since I can’t go anywhere due to the coronavirus pandemic, I figured why not tell some of my favorite/most memorable travel stories. Next, when I experiences a massive, continent-wide power outage:
Now, how does half a continent lose power? No, this is a legitimate question, how does half a continent lose power! Because that’s what happened to all of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and parts of Brazil and Chile on June 16, 2019. The power just, I don’t know, went out at 7:07am for some reason. Argentina’s energy secretary simply gave the explanation that the power grid “collapsed,” which was incredibly helpful. I’m sure the 48 million people without power were quite satisfied with that answer.
Fortunately for me (that was sarcastic), I was traveling between two of these lucky countries that lost power, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. I had to wake up much earlier than usual to catch a ferry between these two lovely cities, which meant I arrived at the ferry terminal around 6:45am for the ferry scheduled to leave at 8:00am. Naturally, I was tired and wanted a coffee, so I bought one from the Argentine Starbucks-equivalent and while they were making it, it happened: the power outage.
I thought it was my fault at first, I mean, they were making my coffee for god’s sake. (Thankfully, they had enough foam and hot water left to give me my latte :), but bigger problems…) Then, I realized that it was so much larger than just the ferry terminal. Buildings across the street had no lights on. The streetlights were out! I thought that this must have affected the whole city of Buenos Aires. Little did I know it was so much larger.
We ended up being delayed a half hour and the lights never came back on in the terminal before the ferry left, but it did start violently raining as it became light out. (We’re just having the best luck today!) We finally made it to Uruguay after an incredibly choppy hour long ferry ride. However, once we arrived on the other side of the Rio Plata, I noticed two things: one, the rain was much harder over here, and two, none of their lights were on either. I thought, maybe they’re just trying to save the planet, you know, better for the environment. But nope, they had lost power too. Holy sh*t, this was so much bigger than I previously realized!
Despite the multinational power outage, I was still able to take a bus tour of Colonia del Sacramento, a very nice UNESCO Heritage Site that is normally a huge tourist haven. But today, the entire city was simply deserted. It could have been the rain, it could have been the power outage, but there was no one around. At this point, we had no idea what caused the outage, but the local Uruguayan tour guide kept on referring to the power outage as a “Chernobyl-like event.”
Dude, under no circumstance should ANYONE refer to ANYTHING as a Chernobyl-like event. Chernobyl killed hundreds of people, left thousands without a home and put most of Europe on a lockdown for radiation poisoning, plus no one is allowed to go within 30 kilometers of Chernobyl even now, 40 years later. So, to reiterate, this power outage was bad, yes, but it was nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl. It was caused by a fault in a circuit from the transmission of electricity from a hydroelectric dam on the Argentine-Paraguay border, NOT a nuclear meltdown.
Later that day, the power came on in most of Uruguay and we were able to pretty much proceed as normal. That’s when we found out about the scale of the power outage though. Over 48 million people in five countries lost power. International newspapers like the New York Times, BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and Al Jazeera reported on it. If these companies are reporting on it, then it must be a big deal because they normally don’t care at all about internal affairs in South America. This power outage even has its own Wikipedia page and is considered to be the 9th largest outage in human history. What a weird flex I can say I have now, I survived the 9th largest power outage in history. Try putting that on a t-shirt.
