The public company Electricité d’Haïti, which operates a power plant north of Port-au-Prince, denounced in a press release “acts of invasion bordering on vandalism”, reducing its electricity production “to zero”.
All residents of Port-au-Prince have been without electricity since Monday, September 2, due to a general outage caused by demonstrators who stormed a power plant in protest against recurring cuts in the region neighboring the Haitian capital.
The Péligre power plant, which has a capacity of 54 megawatts, supplies the metropolitan region of Port-au-Prince and the neighboring department of Centre.
The country in crisis
Protesting against electricity shortages in their department of the Centre, a group of demonstrators invaded the power plant on Monday and forced its closure. At their head was the mayor of Mirebalais, a commune in this department.
Lochard Laguerre explained that these acts were carried out with the aim of drawing the attention of the authorities to the electricity shortages in his region, which have lasted for several months.
The EDH explained these shortages by transformers “having irreversibly broken down” and “above all the impossibility of providing the necessary technical assistance in time”, Port-au-Prince being “cut off from the rest of the country”.
The capital is under the control of armed gangs, who control access to it. Haiti has long suffered from gang violence, but in recent months it has intensified and caused a serious humanitarian crisis, with the country having nearly 600,000 displaced people, according to the UN.
These gangs are accused of numerous murders, rapes, looting and kidnappings for ransom. For two months, a multinational force has begun to deploy in the country to support the Haitian police. But the results are slow in coming, the first Kenyan contingents being still largely insufficient and funding running out.
