LIGHTS OUT

Cuba Plunged Into Nationwide Blackout as Hurricane Ian Batters Power Grid

Over 25,000 customers in southern Florida were also reported to be without power on Tuesday night as a result of the rapidly approaching Ian.

The entire island of Cuba was without electricity on Tuesday night after Hurricane Ian slammed into the nation’s power grid, officials said. Roughly 1 million people lost service after Ian initially made landfall as a Category 3 storm on the western tip of Cuba, but the power grid’s subsequent total collapse soon plunged the country’s other 10 million residents into darkness, with the Electric Union saying attempts to restore service were underway. In addition to the outages, high winds and torrential rainfall brought flooding and downed trees, smashing buildings and laying waste to crops. “It was apocalyptic, a real disaster,” Hirochi Robaina, a tobacco farmer, told the Associated Press. With Ian still barreling toward Florida, more than 20,000 residents on the southern tip of the state were already reported to have lost power, according to data from PowerOutage.us. More than 2 million Floridians along the west coast have been placed under mandatory evacuation orders, with Gov. Ron DeSantis warning of a “really, really major storm surge.”