Vietnam Power Failure Hits Phnom Penh

A massive power outage Wednesday in Southern Vietnam brought rolling blackouts that lasted for hours to Ho Chi Minh City, the entire southeastern region of Vietnam and large sections of Phnom Penh. Vietnam’s state-owned Southern Power Corporation said Wednesday that the problem occurred around 2 p.m. following the breakdown of a 500-kilovolt transmission line that also supplies Cambodia with much-needed electricity. … “We have only about 30 percent of our normal supply of electricity to distribute to important areas of the city, but we are trying to fix the problem,” the [Eletricite du Cambodge] official said yesterday afternoon, adding that Vietnam provides Cambodia with about 40 percent of its national electricity supply. Keo Sovannarith, deputy director of the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority, confirmed the city’s water supply had been hit by the outage. “When the water supply factory looses electricity from the EdC, the machine-which uses electricity to work-can’t pump water to the pipes,” he said. …

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