CARACAS, Venezuela -- Hospitals struggled to get backup generators running, businesses shuttered and families anxiously tried to contact loved ones during Venezuela's worst-ever power failure Friday, raising tensions in a country already on edge from ongoing political turmoil.
Much of the nation of 31 million people was still without electricity as the blackout stretched into a second day and patience began to wear thin.
"This has never happened before," a frustrated Orlando Roa, 54, said, decrying President Nicolas Maduro's administration for failing to maintain the electrical system and letting qualified engineers leave the country. "This is the fault of the government."
The blackout was reported to have hit 22 of 23 states, striking Thursday during the peak of evening rush hour.
In some office buildings in Caracas, people were trapped in elevators. Long lines stretched along main avenues as residents scrambled to get on the few public buses that were still running despite a shortage of parts.
Thousands of people were forced to make long nighttime treks home through some of the world's most violent streets after Caracas' trains shut down.
A hospital advocate reported there were at least two confirmed deaths blamed on the blackout -- a baby in a neonatal unit and a patient at the children's hospital. Venezuelans with chronic conditions like diabetes searched for ice to preserve their limited supplies of medicines.
Maduro ordered schools and all government entities closed and told businesses not to open to facilitate work crews trying to restore power.
By early Friday afternoon, residents and pro-government state broadcaster VTV reported that power was starting to return to parts of Caracas. The stoplights in several neighborhoods were back on while in one office building the electricity flickered to life and then turned off.
Venezuela's socialist government blamed the power failure on right-wing extremists taking orders from the United States, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and said they were intent on causing pandemonium for several days but offered no proof.
"The electricity war declared and directed by the imperialist United States against our people will be overcome!" Maduro wrote on Twitter in his few public remarks on the power failure. "No one can defeat the people of Bolivar and Chavez. Maximum unity patriots!"
In a series of tweets overnight, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ridiculed the Venezuelan government for blaming outsiders for the power failure.
"The power outage and the devastation hurting ordinary Venezuelans is not because of the USA. It's not because of Colombia. It's not Ecuador or Brazil, Europe or anywhere else. Power shortages and starvation are the result of the Maduro regime's incompetence," he wrote.
"No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro," he added.
The blackout comes as Venezuela is in the throes of a political struggle between Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaido, the head of congress who declared himself the nation's rightful president in January and is recognized by the United States and about 50 other nations.
Without power to charge cellphones, social media was quiet. Those who managed to get a signal used the hashtag #SinLuz -- meaning without light -- to share images of cities that on Friday resembled ghost towns.
One user posted a video of a nurse manually pumping air into the lungs of an infant. Others posted photos of people lining up at gas stations in hopes of getting fuel. A man anguished that he'd gone 17 hours without hearing from his mother.
"What impotence!" he lamented.
Netblocks, a nongovernment group based in Europe that monitors Internet censorship, said online connectivity data indicates the power failure is the largest recently in Latin America. The group warned Friday that some of the remaining networks were starting to fall offline as generators and backups began depleting and cell towers shut down.
The director of CODEVIDA, a coalition of Venezuelan health advocacy groups, reported that thousands of dialysis patients were going without treatment as a result of the blackout. While some hospitals were able to rely on backup power sources, others were dark.
At the maternity ward at the Avila Clinic in wealthy eastern Caracas on Thursday night, several mothers wept as nurses held candles to monitor the vital signs of premature babies in incubators.
Zaida Rodriguez, 40, a cardiovascular technician, walked several miles to the private clinic where she works only to be told by bosses that she should leave because the facility would treat only urgent cases and operate with a skeleton staff in order to save on power.
"How is it possible for an oil country like ours to be without an emergency backup in place for these types of situations?" she asked. "This is pathetic."
FINANCIAL DURESS
Venezuela's electrical system was once the envy of Latin America but it has fallen into disrepair after years of poor maintenance and mismanagement. High-ranking officials have been accused in U.S. court proceedings of looting government money earmarked for the electrical system.
While intermittent failures have become regular occurrences in Venezuela of late, rarely have so many states simultaneously been without power for such an extended period. Until now, Caracas had largely been spared the worst of a collapse in the nation's grid.
The government keeps home power bills exceptionally low -- just a couple of dollars a month -- relying heavily on subsidies from the Maduro administration, which is under increasing financial duress.
The nation is experiencing hyperinflation projected to reach 10 million percent this year, is grappling with food and medical shortages, and has lost about 10 percent of its population to migration in the past few years -- including many with valuable energy expertise. Venezuela's economic woes are likely to increase as U.S. sanctions against its oil industry kick in.
"This is part of a power war against the state," the government-owned electricity operator, Corpoelec, said in a tweet. It said that the Guri hydroelectric complex in southern Bolivar state -- the source of most of the country's electricity -- had been "sabotaged." But authorities provided no evidence of that.
Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez described it as a "cyber" attack intended to derail the whole system. He said electricity in Venezuela's eastern region had been restored within hours.
"What's the intention?" he said. "To submit the Venezuelan people to various days without electricity to attack, to mistreat, so that vital areas would be without power."
Pro-government officials often blame power failures on Venezuela's opposition, accusing foes of attacking power substations with Molotov cocktails, though they rarely provide any evidence.
Guaido did a survey of Caracas on Friday to evaluate the impact of the blackout, blaming Maduro for the state of affairs and looking to capitalize on what some decried as a sign of Venezuela's new status as a "failed state" even though it sits atop the world's largest oil reserves.
"It's clear who is responsible for this disaster," he said, renewing his call for Venezuelans to take to the streets today in protest. "They keep making excuses, they keep looking for scapegoats, when corruption, calamity are what have caused this situation."
Rubio, who has been driving the Trump administration's confrontational stance toward Maduro, seemed to relish Rodriguez's accusations that he was somehow to blame for the power crisis.
"My apologies to people of Venezuela," Rubio said in a message on Twitter. "I must have pressed the wrong thing on the 'electronic attack' app I downloaded from Apple. My bad."
The blackout snarled traffic during confusion generated by blackened stoplights.
As the blackout wore on, Venezuelans already struggling to put food on the table worried the little they have would spoil in refrigerators without power. Business owners griped over losses that were certain to compound their already bleak economic outlook.
"The only thing left for me to do is wait for the light to return," said Jose Rodriguez, 51, the owner of a small restaurant in Caracas. "Today will be a lost day for me."
Information for this article was contributed by Scott Smith, Fabiola Sanchez, Christopher Torchia, Christine Armario, Jorge Rueda and Joshua Goodman of The Associated Press; and by Mary Beth Sheridan and Mariana Zuniga of The Washington Post.
A Section on 03/09/2019