A great tragedy has occurred on our island. A massive explosion at a military base in Cyprus on Monday knocked out the island's largest power station, a spokesman for the state-run electricity authority said.

"We can't assess the extent of the damage, but it's a biblical disaster," spokesman Costas Gavrielides.

Vassilikos power station is very close to the Evangelos Florakis navy base, hit by a massive explosion in a munitions dump. At least eight people were killed, according to unconfirmed reports quoted by the Cyprus News Agency.

More than 90 containers of gunpowder had been kept in the open at the Evangelos Florakis base since they were confiscated by the Cypriot authorities from a ship intercepted in 2009 sailing from Iran to Syria in violation of United Nations sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

The shockwave destroyed the walls of two multi-storey buildings on the base, and generator buildings and fuel tanks at the nearby Vassilikos power plant. Debris was blown as far as 3km (2 miles) from the base and hundreds of trees were flattened.

Nearly all the windows in the village of Zygi were blown out, while roof tiles were torn off and windows broken in the village of Mari.

As a result of this catastrophe there will be scheduled power cuts every day through out the entire island for as long as it takes to fix the damage caused. Today we already experienced our first power outage and there will be more to come. Since our server is locally based and although it is supported by the UPS system we have, the long periods are simply too much for our setup to handle so if you see our site down then most likely we lost power a couple hours before that and our UPS died. A simple way to check if we have power or not would be to look at our RoboBench live video stream, where if you see lighting in the scene(which is powered without UPS) then we have Power and if not then we are on UPS (on which the server and the cameras are connected) We shall try our best to keep the site up during this period. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for you understanding.

Unlike our site, the Fund Raiser for our OSRC (Open Source Remote Control) can be found at IndieGoGo, which is an independent site. If you are interested in the Project then make sure to check it out and help us bring the device to reality. There are many implementations of a system such as this and we are more than willing to bring them to life.

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