Five Hours of Blackout in Cannes Before the Closing of the Festival
People in the streets due power outage in southeast France hit 160,000 homes—including the glitzy Cannes Film Festival. Photo: @grntmedia
May 24, 2025 Hour: 1:30 pm
Blackout in Cannes early this Saturday morning, which forced to stop the last screenings of the Festival, which began to fear for its closing gala scheduled for the night, a cut that the authorities attribute to a sabotage that lasted five hours.
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Around 160,000 homes were left without power, but not the festival palace, which is equipped with its own generators, leading the Festival organizers to send a message of reassurance from the start: The awarding of the Palme d’Or was not in danger.
While the great European film gathering continued as normal, confusion reigned in the city, with disruptions to rail and road transport, cars circulating without traffic lights, and businesses operating at half speed due to lack of electricity.
The blackout occurred at 10:00 AM (08:00 GMT) when a high-voltage tower collapsed in the town of Villeneve-Loubet.
The services of RTE, the French electricity grid operator, were unable to react because the power line was already weakened after a fire broke out in a substation in Tonneron, further north, in the early hours of the morning.
The French authorities consider both incidents intentional and are investigating whether there is a connection between them. Flammable material was found at the substation that could have been used to fuel the flames, while three of the four pillars of the high-voltage tower appeared to have been cut.
The French Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation into the events, which it considers to be of criminal origin, although there have been no arrests so far.
“There is no doubt that this is a criminal act,” insisted the mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, while the prefecture assured that “all means have been mobilized to identify, search for, arrest and bring the perpetrators of these acts to justice.”
Five hours after the power outage, around 3:00 PM (13:00 GMT), the light was gradually returning to the city and other neighboring towns also affected.
Train delays are expected until 8:00 PM in the evening, while firefighters had to carry out a hundred interventions, mainly to rescue people trapped in elevators.
Author: ACJ
Source: EFE