Southern France left without electricity on closing day of Cannes Film Festival

On the morning of May 24, the closing day of the 78th Cannes Film Festival, the power supply in the south of France was partially cut off.

The newspaper Le Monde writes that the power outage left about 160,000 homes without electricity, including parts of Cannes, as festival organizers were preparing for the Palme d’Or ceremony.

The French national energy operator RTE said that the outage was caused by two major incidents: a fire broke out at a high-voltage substation during the night, and a few hours later a power line support tower fell in the Saint-Cassien Lake area.

RTE does not rule out that the fire could be the result of deliberate actions.