{"id":105593,"date":"2020-08-17T15:50:13","date_gmt":"2020-08-17T22:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=105593"},"modified":"2020-08-17T15:50:13","modified_gmt":"2020-08-17T22:50:13","slug":"sri-lanka-plunged-into-darkness-after-power-outage-hits-entire-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/08\/17\/sri-lanka-plunged-into-darkness-after-power-outage-hits-entire-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka plunged into darkness after power outage hits entire nation"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Courtesy MailOnline<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>The entire nation of Sri Lanka was left without power Monday in a seven-hour outage following a failure at a key electricity facility, officials said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Minister of Power Dullas Alahapperuma said an unspecified &#8220;technical issue&#8221; at the Kerawalapitiya power complex just outside the capital Colombo was the cause of the blackout, which hit the entire nation of 21 million people at about midday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Power was restored in Colombo after seven hours, but some other parts of the island nation were yet to be reconnected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was the worst disruption since March 2016, when the whole country was without electricity for more than eight hours following a massive system breakdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The public utilities regulator said there would be a probe into the failure and gave the state-run electricity monopoly, the Ceylon Electricity Board, three days to explain the massive disruption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The power cut caused chaos on already congested roads in Colombo, with traffic lights not operating and police struggling to man key intersections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Water supply was also affected as there was no electricity to operate the pumps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hospitals and other critical infrastructure in the country had power generators. The main airport has remained mostly shut because of the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sri Lanka generates just over half of its electricity through thermal power. The remainder comes from hydro and wind power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Kerawalapitiya is an oil-fired thermal power station with a 300-megawatt capacity, about 12 percent of the country&#8217;s electricity demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Localised power failures are not uncommon but nationwide outages are rare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Courtesy MailOnline The entire nation of Sri Lanka was left without power Monday in a seven-hour outage following a failure at a key electricity facility, officials said. Minister of Power Dullas Alahapperuma said an unspecified &#8220;technical issue&#8221; at the Kerawalapitiya power complex just outside the capital Colombo was the cause of the blackout, which hit [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}