A large area of Santo Domingo was without running water yesterday and the pervasive blackouts kept many people across the entire country without electricity for 20 consecutive hours. Generation stood at a mere 575 MW in the fact of the 1,700 MW demand. Hoy reports that for most of yesterday production met only one-third of the national demand. Like most of the water supply systems in the country, those that supply Santo Domingo depend on electric water pumps to move the water out to the customers. Yesterday, the authorities announced that 215 circuits on the national grid removed from service. Hundreds of thousands of clients were experiencing blackouts of 20 hours, and in Santo Domingo people are reporting electricity arriving for as few as fifteen minutes and, for the more fortunate, as long as two or three hours. In the north of the country, there was only 136.6 MW available to the consumers. By 6pm, production crept up to 889 MW at the start of the peak-demand hours. Distributors Ede-Norte and Ede-Sur told reporters that 385,000 of their clients were without electricity, and Ede-Este said they had disconnected 71 of the 159 circuits in their network. The problems with the power sector are financial, given the major debts the past administration left outstanding with suppliers.