Chile Declares Curfew as Power Outage Sweeps Country

Chile’s government imposed a curfew and declared a state of emergency in response to a sweeping blackout that cut electricity to most of the country and plunged the streets of the capital, Santiago, into chaos on Tuesday.

The massive outage, which began in the afternoon, affected eight million households in the South American nation of 19 million people, officials said. The affected area spanned 600 miles, from Arica, the northernmost city, to Los Lagos in the south, officials said. In Santiago, it knocked out traffic lights, stranded people in elevators and shut down the subway network.

Hours later, the government announced a curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. in the regions affected by the outage. Schools in those regions will be closed on Wednesday, with about 300,000 students affected, officials said.

“Today has been a difficult day for millions of countrymen,” Gabriel Boric, the president, said at a news conference on Tuesday night.

As officials scrambled to restore power, chaotic scenes played out in Santiago as downed traffic lights caused stalled roads and masses of commuters were evacuated from the subway, spilling out onto the streets and vying for spots on replacement buses.

“People were sprinting everywhere trying to get to the buses,” said Patricio Rodriguez, 35. “Everyone was desperate to get home.”

Mr. Rodriguez said he was forced to walk nine miles to get to his aunt’s house. “People were driving the wrong way up the main roads, it was chaos,” he said. “It was like the Wild West — it felt lawless.”

By late Tuesday, power had been restored to about four million households, Mr. Boric said. But he warned that the recovery was slow and unstable, and the situation remained precarious.

He blamed the country’s power companies for allowing the outage to occur and for not restoring power earlier, adding, “This is outrageous.” The outage was caused by failure of a transmission system, officials said.

Soldiers and national police officers were sent to affected regions, officials said, and in Santiago, helicopters circled the city.

Emergency services, hospitals, prisons and airports across the country were operating on backup electricity systems and generators, the national disaster agency said.