Iași left without heating and hot water after fire knocks out city power plant
About 22,000 apartments in Iași, along with schools, hospitals and public institutions, have lost heating and hot water after a transformer fire shut down the city's combined heat and power plant. Repairs are under way, but no date has been given for restoring supply.
Iași, one of Romania's largest cities, woke up on Sunday without district heating or hot water, after a fire on Saturday afternoon tore through the electrical installations of the CET Iași combined heat and power plant. Fire crews said the blaze started at an electrical transformer and spread across the first floor of an industrial hall of about 1,000 square metres. Power to the site was cut, seven fire engines were sent in and the fire was put out. Fifteen employees were in the building at the time, and no one was hurt.
The consequences are far-reaching. The city's centralised system serves some 22,000 apartments, 138 public institutions and 171 businesses. Hot water kept flowing from taps until around 4 a.m. on Sunday, then stopped. Hospitals have switched to generators, and in recent days only hospitals, schools and other public buildings had been receiving heating, on request, as temperatures started to drop.
"The plant is at zero," said Sorin Turcu, head of the Energia union at CET Iași, explaining that contactors, transformers and insulators had burned and that the plant's pumps no longer have power. In his view, the plant could be back in a few days, or the repairs could take months. Thick black smoke over the site came from burning rubber protection on much of the equipment, said Alin Aivanoaie, director of Termoservice Iași.
Mayor Mihai Chirica suggested the cause may have been an overload coming from the national grid, noting that the city had experienced several voltage drops throughout Saturday. City Hall said more than 50 plant employees and electrical and energy specialists were working on Sunday to clear the debris and assess the damage, and that grid operator DelGaz Grid had been asked to carry out the technical work needed to restore electricity to the plant. Apart from the damaged electrical substation, no other problems have been found in the plant's infrastructure, according to the municipality.
Officials contacted school and hospital managers on Sunday morning to find temporary heating and hot-water solutions for these priority institutions. Chirica promised that crews would work around the clock if necessary to restart the plant as soon as possible, but did not give a date. The outage comes as weather forecasters warn of rain, strong winds and colder weather, with a yellow wind warning in force for Moldavia, the region that includes Iași, from Sunday evening.