By:Miningweekly

SANTIAGO - Chile's power grids and major copper mines were coming back online on Wednesday after a major outage rocked the world's top producer of the red metal, with power companies working to restore the system to full operation, authorities said.

The power outage, caused by a transmission line failure in the country's north, struck mid-afternoon on Tuesday, plunging the most of the country into darkness and knocking out electricity to major mines, buffeting global metal markets.

In its early morning report on Wednesday, Chile's National Electricity Coordinator (CEN) said that over 90% of residential consumption had been restored, although media outlets reported intermittent power in some cities.

"The National Electricity Coordinator continues working to achieve 100% recovery of consumption," it said.

Anglo American said its Los Bronces and El Soldado mines in central Chile were normalizing operations on Wednesday morning, while its Chagres smelter still had no electricity but was using generators to keep critical processes running.

In its final report late on Tuesday, state-owned mining giant Codelco, the world's largest copper producer, said that power outages were continuing at most of its divisions.

It said there was a partial recovery of power at El Teniente enabling ventilation of the underground mine to resume, while in the small Salvador mine service was restored and work was being done to start-up the concentrator and smelter.

Other mining firms have yet to provide an update on the status of their operations. The regions hit by the outage ended a curfew at 6:00 a.m. local time (09:00 GMT) declared by the government as part of a state of emergency.

Santiago's subway service announced that it would restart services on most of its lines and stations.