News of: Wednesday, April 06 2005,

Power outage and explosions in centre Amsterdam

Large parts of the centre of Amsterdam and neighbourhood 'de Pijp' were hit by a electricity outage this evening, between 9pm and 11 pm.

Probably the outage has to do with a fire that broke out around 8.30pm in a transformer kiosk of the electricity network, in Amstelstraat, near the former ABN Amro bank building at Rembrandtplein square. The building has been empty for a few years now.

Two explosions were reported together with the fire.

Police blocked off the Rembrandtplein area for some time, and are investigating what happened.

Around 11 pm the electricity company Nuon had fixed the problem.