<Anchor> In the
morning of the 9th, in most areas of Yeoju, Gyeonggi-do, electricity was cut off for an hour and a half, and the traffic lights went out and the building elevator stopped. It is estimated that the substation equipment, which is nearly 30 years old, has caused the failure.
Correspondent Kim Sang-min reported.
<Reporter>
The traffic light in the middle of downtown Yeoju has gone out.
In the middle of the road, the police control traffic with hand signals.
Citizens inside the house are equally perplexed.
[All melted.] The
electricity suddenly went out at 10:26 am today.
Power supply was cut off in nine of the 12 towns and villages in Yeoju, Gyeonggi Province.
Government offices such as city hall had to turn on emergency generators, and various safety accidents such as car crashes and elevator trapping accidents followed.
[Kwon Yoon-gi/President of a seafood store: I got a styrofoam box, got ice, and ran around diligently. In the case of a hospital, it is quite difficult without an emergency generator, medicines.]
[Lee Myung-sook/Restaurant President: Today, for some reason, I cooked rice in a gas cooker (not an electric rice cooker). there's a lot of it I couldn't use an electric rice cooker, so I cooked it at my house.] About 52,800
households had to suffer power outages by the time the electricity came on after an hour and a half.
KEPCO believes that there is a problem with the switchgear of the unmanned substation in Gyo-dong, Yeoju.
The switchgear has been in use since 1993 when the Yeoju substation was built.
It was already in the target of replacing old equipment, but it was confirmed that the pre-work for replacement started yesterday.
KEPCO, which caused a large-scale blackout, said it had been checking unmanned substations once a week, and said that it would determine the exact cause through a thorough investigation.
(Video coverage: Park Hyun-chul, video editing: Park Ji-in)