[NEWS.YAHOO] A blackout cut power to much of Venezuela on Friday, snarling traffic in the capital Caracas and other major cities as authorities scrambled to restore electricity after the outage, which twice interrupted a presidential broadcast.
Pedestrians streamed into the streets of Caracas as the blackout shuttered the underground metro trains and left frustrated drivers honking in the chaos without stoplights.
Government ministers in the late afternoon said they expected power would be restored shortly. It was the second nationwide major electricity outage in less than a year.
"How am I going to get to my house? By the grace of God," said Pedro Mayora, 58, an accountant who was waiting outside the Metro to see how he would reach his home on the poor west end of the city.
Workers stood in groups outside evacuated buildings, some complaining of difficulty in communicating over congested cellular phone lines.
An outage at a power station in the center of the country led to other generation centers going offline, halting service in that region and in the Andes region in the west, Electricity Minister Jesse Chacon told state television
... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
The problems extended to Maracaibo, Venezuela's second city, and the industrial center of Valencia.
The OPEC nation has suffered an increasing number of power outages in recent years, which critics have attributed to low electricity tariffs and limited state investment following the 2007 nationalization of the power sector.
