Cuba’s electrical grid collapsed late on Tuesday, local officials said, leaving the entire country in the dark shortly after Hurricane Ian ploughed through the western end of the island leaving a path of de-struction in its wake.
The sprawling Category 3 hurricane was barrel-ing north towards the Dry Tortugas, off the Florida Keys, late on Tuesday, with maximum sustained winds of 120 miles per hour (195 km per hour), the US National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said.
Cuba’s electrical grid — decades-old and in desperate need of modernization, has been faltering for months with blackouts an everyday event across much of the island.
But officials said the storm had proven to be too much for the system, provoking a failure that shut off the lights for the island’s 11.3 million people.
“The system was already operating under com-plex conditions with the passage of Hurricane Ian,” said Lazaro Guerra, technical director of Cuba’s Electricity Union. —Reuters
