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Power restoration now underway; outage caused by contractor going through 3 High Voltage Cables
16th September 2025, 14:02 |
Updated 19:55
Power has now been restored to a majority of the Rock following a total power outage which began at around 1:30pm and lasted over five hours. A number of areas are still waiting for their electricity to be restored.
GibElec has confirmed the outage was caused by a contractor going through three main High Voltage Cables. SDE Ltd was carrying out work for the recently announced data centre in the are
It claims it had provided detailed maps of the cables in the area, as is standard procedure.
Testing to identify the damaged cables and which remaining cables may be used to restore power has began. Work is currently ongoing to restore power district by district .
The emergency number 999 was down due to the power outage, along with all the Royal Gibraltar Police phone lines. These are now up and operational.
Services at St Bernard's Hospital was unaffected as the hospital's generators are working normally.
The Fire and Rescue Service said it had received a "substantial" number of calls from people trapped in lifts.
It said all its appliances responded to incidents throughout Gibraltar, with crews redeployed to attend to "numerous" calls.
With Main Street full of tourists this afternoon, including from two visiting cruise ships, some shops closed due to the power cut.
The cinema cancelled all screenings for today. Traffic lights are also out.
The Government says it's already in the advanced stages of considering the implementation of legislation to ensure that contractors can be held to account in situations such as these.
It adds it's just successfully settled a claim for compensation with the contractors who caused a blackout in April this year at the BESS site.The Government says it's also actively considering what action can be taken against SDE Limited in relation to today's power cut.
Ros Astengo met up with GibElec's acting CEO, Stanley Antoniou at the scene where it all happened.