Woke up to a rainy Fathers' Day (and my birthday) Sunday in Buenos Aires. It was eerie - no streetlights, in fact no lights on the street at all except for a lone bus, no traffic. Lights were on in the hotel, some at least, but I could hear generators running. Ah, power outage!
The generators in the hotel couldn't power the elevators so we walked up and down to the seventh floor. For some reason, the generator(s) vented into the stairwell. The fumes became more concentrated as you went higher. That wasn't fun.
Some people went into a mild panic about the outage. For me - unh! No biggie. We got breakfast, we got coffee. Life was fine.
We found out later this outage was huge. More than 50 million people lost power for about eight hours. All of Argentina as well as parts of Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil were without power. I still don't know what caused it. Someone said it was because of all the rain in the area. We were told that Argentina had three times more rain during the week we were there than they normally get in the entire month of June.
No comments:
Post a Comment