00:01Appliances fail because the voltage fluctuates.
00:05Roberto Capio and his wife Teresa Herrera live in Taguar, an hour from Caracas.
00:10They experience constant power outages.
00:13The water supply is unreliable, and so is transportation.
00:20The public services for Venezuelans are in complete deterioration.
00:26We can talk about the 24 states of the country without electricity or where electricity is restricted.
00:34We are forced to live without electricity or without water or without sanitation
00:39and with salaries that do not allow us everything.
00:44If I pay for sanitation, how do I eat if I pay for electricity?
00:53The rationing of electricity, once a temporary measure, is a crisis that affects millions of families today.
01:03The first thing that affects us is thinking that the few foods we might have might get spoiled, the proteins.
01:09What affects us is running out of batteries on our cell phones and not being able to receive an emergency
01:15call
01:16or respond to someone who is telling us something.
01:22His wife Teresa says there's only running water every 18 days,
01:27and she is pleading for improvements to public transportation and health care.
01:34A problem here is transportation.
01:37There's no ambulance, there are hardly any doctors.
01:41Whoever gets sick dies, I guess.
01:44Here we have to wait three or four hours for a bus.
01:48The road is terribly bad.
01:50It is very dangerous.
01:53The energy crisis has a domino effect.
01:56Without power, there is no constant pumping of drinking water, and gas becomes scarce.
02:02Living has become an obstacle course, according to the president of the Venezuelan Society of Hydraulic Engineering.
02:12Our large systems demand about 2,000 megawatts at the national level.
02:16That is a very large number.
02:18Caracas alone needs 500.
02:20So if the power grid does not work properly,
02:23it also affects the water supply systems,
02:25which are very large systems that bring water from very far away
02:29and were designed to work with an adequate electrical system.
02:36About 80% of thermoelectric generation is out of service due to lack of maintenance and breakdowns.
02:41Failures exceed 30,000 interruptions a year in different regions.
02:45Recently, industry heavyweights like Siemens and General Electric dispatched expert teams
02:50to assess the damage and save critical units.
02:53But experts warn the road to full recovery won't come cheap.
02:56Restoring the power network could cost up to $40 billion.
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