Yesterday, September 25, half of Iceland was without power due an outage whose cause still remains unknown. Areas of Iceland affected include from Blönduós to Höfn, the entirety of northern and eastern Iceland. Such a widespread power outage is nearly unprecedented.
The power outage began around noon yesterday and is said to have last two hours in most regions and up to three in others.
A public Facebook announcement by Landsnet regarding the outages can be seen below.
The power outage was caused by a disruption to the Fljótsdal line, which runs from the Alcoa aluminum smelter to Kárahnjúkavirkjun. The cause of the damage is not known at this time.
In a statement to RÚV, Steinunn Þorsteinsdóttir, information officer at Landsnet, stated that the Fljótsdal line created a chain reaction, resulting in the widespread outages.
“It’s not very often we have nearly half the country without power at once,” she said. Alcoa aluminum smelter is also reported to have been offline during the outages.
“At this stage, we don’t know exactly what happened,” Steinunn said. “Our priority was to bring the electricity back to the area. Now that it’s back on, it’s time to take a look at what happened.”
