The neighborhood of Buenos Aires without electricity for 13 days: blinds down, suspended elevators and wasted goods

The heat wave has lasted 13 days. Blazing days of sunshine, red weather alert, extreme temperatures have taken over the scene and brought the issue of tasteless elevator climate to the public agenda. Mars 2023 has twice broken the historic temperature record set in 1906: on Thursday 2, the thermometer rose to 38°C and on Saturday 11, it rose to 38.8°C. This has an impact on energy consumption and, in addition, on power outages.

Monte Castro, a barrio delimited by the calles Baigorria, Joaquín V. González, Juan Agustín García, Lope de Vega, the avenida Álvarez Jonte e Irigoyen, encircled between Floresta and Villa Devoto, is testigo de lo que pasa cuando las familias depends on the electric energy. The power outage is irregular: entire blocks which combine phases with light, phases without light, undervoltages, overvoltages, intermittences. Neighbors point out that the fluctuations were pronounced as early as Wednesday, March 1.when a massive blackout affected twenty million people in the city and province of Buenos Aires and in various provinces of the country.

Diego worked, in March, a day and a half out of a total of nine working days. He is a dentist and has a practice on Avenida Segurola, half a block from the intersection with Avenida Álvarez Jonte. “I can’t do anything at my job. All my attention is electrodependent. You can’t do an extraction or a root canal without light,” he says. From this first massive cut, the light came back to all on Monday 6 and until five o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday 7. Then only intermittent weekends he learned by voice neighbors.

Alicia, who lives in an eight-story building on Lascano Street between Sanabria and Segurola, told him. “Since November, our electricity has been systematically cut off. Now it’s every day: if it’s not one phase, it’s the other. We have a single-phase water pump that works but we cannot put the three-phase,” he says. In their building, where an electro-dependent person lives, they stopped using the elevator twenty days ago because, when it works, they fear not to arrive at their destination before the new power cut. “On Saturday, a person got stuck in the elevator because they didn’t know the light comes and goes here“, of.

Just like Diego’s office and the building where Alicia lives, there are also businesses in the neighborhood: bookstores, solariums, hair salons, opticians, a supermarket that had to throw food up to that she is rescued by an electric generator, an ice cream parlor on the corner of Álvarez Jonte Avenue and Bombay Passage, which has lowered its blinds since the beginning of the month and which had to waste its products, and a cabinet of lawyers. The cut extends from block to block: it reaches Villa Devoto, continues through Floresta.

María works in this law firm located in Segurola 2091. “The firm works 90% with electricity from the computers, because the door is electric for security. We had to work without air because the light was intermittent and coming in at low voltage, the air and the computers were off. This hurt us in terms of writing because now the Courts are all online. We had to do days of attention because as we are a social security legal study and we work with elderly people It is inhumane to lock people 60 or older in this heat in a place with no ventilation or air conditioning.“, he reports.

Esteban is another trader from Monte Castro, another neighbor affected by the power cuts. His activity includes the gym and aesthetics category. It has accumulated fifteen days of non-viable light supply. “I have the premises closed and the payment of the rent is delayed because I have no money. The power they deliver is overpowered or underpowered, and my equipment, due to energy protection, does not turn on”. The same thing happens to Valeria, manager of a tanning and pilates center. “We have been without electricity for 18 days. Either we don’t have it, or when it comes back, it gives us a tension shock. In addition to not having billing, we had big losses: I have no phase, and the emergency lighting, the luminous tubes, the computer and the air conditioning burned me”.

The neighbors don’t know what to do. They say having intermittent or low blood pressure is the same or worse than having none. “There are blocks where there is a house yes, a house no, it is skipped. So alternately, throughout the neighborhood. In the block where I am, on Segurola, the whole block is without light,” remarks Diego, the dentist. He didn’t get answers from Edesur. He made complaints through Whatsapp, where he got an auto-reply and a machine called him asking if he had returned the supply, and through text, where they didn’t even respond.

Just as there are areas of Monte Castro with a faulty energy supply since the beginning of the month, similar situations have also been recorded in Slaughterhouses, Flowers, Caballito, Villa Devoto, Villa Luro, and other neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, which led to protests with blockades of streets and avenues. On Friday, March 10, a group of people marched to General Paz at Emilio Castro Avenue, in the Mataderos neighborhood, to block both lanes of traffic in protest at nine days without electricity.

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