On November 11, the country was without electricity for five hours, with full power not restored until the following night. In the capital, the breakdown led to chaos: metro passengers had to be evacuated and traffic lights failed. Protests even broke out in some neighborhoods.
According to the report, the outage occurred at a substation where a live line was manually disconnected. This caused a high-intensity short circuit, after which security systems automatically switched off several lines to limit the damage. Authorities have now proposed new protection measures to prevent recurrence.
The population has been complaining for some time about frequent power cuts that sometimes last up to ten hours. Causes include inadequate maintenance, illegal connections and payment arrears. Despite these problems, the Dominican Republic remains a popular destination: in 2024, the country received more than eleven million tourists, mainly from the United States.
European power outage in 2006
In the evening of November 4, 2006, power went out in parts of Europe – which also affected parts of Belgium (the Antwerp region, Ghent, Liège in particular). The disruption was caused by the temporary shutdown of a 380 kV line in Germany to allow a cruise ship to pass through — something that had been planned, but the chain effect on the European grid had not been sufficiently estimated.