Power Outages Hit Neighborhoods Amid Extreme Heatwaves

[Anchor]

With electricity consumption surging due to record-breaking heat, numerous neighborhoods experienced power outages through the night, including today, August 5th, causing severe inconvenience for residents.

Our first report comes from Im Jihyeon.

[Reporter]

An apartment complex in Gyeyang-gu, Incheon.

No lights are visible through the apartment windows, and even the streetlights within the complex are completely dark.

A blackout occurred at around 8:00 PM last night, affecting some 400 households across three buildings in the complex.

Unable to run air conditioners amid the sweltering heat that persisted late into the night, residents cooled off inside their cars instead of their homes.

[Han Hye-jung / Apartment Resident: As the cold air faded, staying inside the house became driving me crazy. With nowhere to go and having to go to work, but having nowhere suitable to go, I just stayed here (in the car)...]

Some residents even grabbed blankets and headed to nearby community centers or libraries to try and get some sleep.

Amid the scorching weather, anxieties are also growing over whether food might spoil.

[Apartment Resident: What's in the refrigerator, if things melt and spoil in there, that's what worries us.]

The district office believes the blackout was caused by a transformer exploding due to increased electricity usage.

At around the same time, a power outage presumed to have been caused by an electrical overload occurred at an apartment complex in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, and was restored after about an hour. Additionally, power supply was temporarily cut off in a residential area in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, affecting 282 households.

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At around 4:40 PM yesterday, a report was received that four vacationers were drifting at a beach in Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province.

The Coast Guard successfully rescued all four people who were drifting away from the shore.

It was determined that they began drifting after losing their paddles while riding paddleboards or suffering from exhaustion while kayaking.

(Video by Choi Jun-sik | Video Editing by Lee Seung-jin)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.