Power outage on Reem Island leaves Abu Dhabi residents in the dark


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ABU DHABI // Residents of a tower development were left in the dark on Sunday, after a power outage wiped out electricity in several towers on Reem Island.

The lights went out at buildings in Marina Square around 6.15pm on Sunday, leaving hundreds outside their buildings for more than an hour.

Lamis Sarg, 33, from Egypt, was with her six-year-old daughter in an elevator in the Marina Blue building when the power was cut.

“The lights suddenly went out in the elevator and I was using my phone as a torch,” she said. “I was banging on the doors and calling out, and a security guard heard me.

“It was very scary. You tend to panic in situations like that. We were only in there for fifteen minutes, but I thought we were going to be in there for a year.”

A representative of the building management met residents in the lobby of one of the affected buildings, Al Maha Tower.

He said the power cut was due to a substation going down.

Majority of the towers in the Marina Square development were affected.

Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority could not be reached for comment on Sunday night.

Power and electricity were restored to some buildings by around 7.45pm.

mcroucher@thenational.ae

rpennington@thenational.ae

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Founders: Mounir Nakhla, Ahmed Mohsen and Mohamed Aboulnaga

Based: Cairo, Egypt

Sector: transport and logistics

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Investment: approximately $8 million

Investors include: Singapore’s Battery Road Digital Holdings, Egypt’s Algebra Ventures, Uber co-founder and former CTO Oscar Salazar

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Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology, a digital system in which data is recorded across multiple places at the same time. Unlike traditional databases, DLTs have no central administrator or centralised data storage. They are transparent because the data is visible and, because they are automatically replicated and impossible to be tampered with, they are secure.

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