On March 7th, 2019 Venezuela’s power went out. The outage resulted in multitudes of infrastructure, such as water, to be shut down. During the massive crisis there were a lot of patients in critical condition who died because their life support had been shut down. The toll is still unknown but the Venezuelan people have endured a lot.

  The issue that most people faced during the massive outage was that they could not find any food. Since the power outage, many stores in Venezuela have been pillaged and plundered, and though the act of doing this was illegal and risky for all who were involved, these brave people looted these stores for survival.

   Dahlia Pacheco (12) believes the looters were not wrong for looting the stores, stating, “The government of Venezuela’s job is to protect its people, they should of had back up[ plans], instead the people were neglected. I do not believe the looters should be punished, because they were only trying to survive.

 The director of cyber operations and a staff engineer  at secure grid companies Cybirical and Ampirical Solutions,  Nathan Wallace, stated this about the , “It sounds like there may be lack of maintenance and some mismanagement. And typically if a system hasn’t been maintained, that means they really don’t have the visualization needed to understand the state of the system in real time. If the procedure for black start is not accurately representing the state of the system, there can be problems.” A black start is when a small diesel engine or natural gas turbine is used to boost power grids. So without this crucial action, Venezuela and its people suffered.

  Finally, after four days of no power, the government of Venezuela announced that its power was coming back on. Now the lights are on but from that another issue has arisen; their water is not clean. Many citizens  reported that the water coming from their tap was contaminated by oil. However some of the citizens are taking their chances with the water because of how desperate they are to drink.

  Nicole MacKenzie (12)  a senior at West was given the question “Do you think we could do anything to help the people ?” and her response was one of sincerity: “I’m not sure. I think that we probably should be doing something to help, but with the current issues with their government we have to consider how dangerous it is for us to try to interfere with another unstable country.” With words like that from MacKenzie, where exactly does that leave Venezuela, and what are they trying to do about it?

  During a press conference’ the minister of information had said that the interim president Juan Guaido may have played a role in the blackouts. However Guaido says that the United States may have played a role, and opposition to Guaido say that the corruption and mismanagement of the government is to blame. The jury is still out on who is to blame, but the point is it happened and a lot of people got caught in the crossfire.