Nationwide power failure hobbles Colombia

The electrical grid of Colombia collapsed Thursday, causing a nationwide blackout that briefly halted stock trading and trapped people in elevators as authorities tried to determine the cause.

By midday, power was slowly being restored to homes and companies, and the northern part of Bogota, the capital, was back to normal.

President Alvaro Uribe told journalists in the southwestern city of Cali that the blackout, which began at midmorning, “appears to have affected the entire country.”

Luis Alarcon, manager of state-controlled electricity distributor ISA, issued a statement saying the power failure apparently began with an undetermined technical glitch at a substation in Bogota and quickly spread to the rest of the nation.

Authorities said 10 people were trapped in elevators during the outage.

Police poured into the streets to direct traffic after 10,000 stoplights went dark.

Cellphones went dead at midmorning from the northern Caribbean coast to the southern Amazon jungle region.

Bogota’s stock exchange resumed trading around noon as power returned, and trading continued late because of the lost time.

Hospitals and airports operated normally using generators.

Rosa Ortiz, who runs a cigarette stand near a busy intersection in Bogota, said that with traffic lights knocked out, “we’ve seen a few near-accidents, but so far the drivers seem to be adapting to the situation.”

There was no indication that there had been an attack on the electrical grid, though leftist rebels routinely sabotage transmission lines as part of their 4-decade-old campaign to overthrow the government.

Short-lived localized blackouts are common.

Damage to the economy was not expected to be serious.