Chile lifts state of emergency imposed over massive blackout

Power was restored to most of Chile’s 19 million people Wednesday after the country's most disruptive blackout in 15 years, the government said, as authorities lifted a strict curfew imposed when the outage left 98% of the population without electricity. 

Chilean Interior Minister said electricity had largely returned to Chile's 14 afflicted regions, although 220,000 residents remained without power on Wednesday.  Restoring power proved to be more problematic in the country's north, where a fault in a backbone transmission line first triggered the outage that set off a chain reaction of power plant and transmission line shut-downs across the South American nation. 

 Exactly how that happened remains under investigation.  She told reporters that authorities were also investigating the circumstances under which three people died during Tuesday’s blackout, saying they had been “dependent on electricity,” without offering further details.