-
Clients drink and talk to candlelight during a blackout in Sao Paulo - Source: Reuters -
Related
Brazil's president sought an urgent explanation for the worst
power outage in a decade, which left a huge swath of the country in
the dark for more than five hours and raised doubts about the
reliability of its energy infrastructure.
The blackout on Tuesday night left tens of millions of people
without power across most of the country's wealthy south-eastern
region, halting subways and snarling traffic in major cities like
Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva summoned his energy minister,
Edison Lobao, for an urgent meeting in the capital Brasilia to
explain what caused the outage.
An energy ministry official said that initial findings showed the
outage was triggered when a major storm downed three power lines
that run from the giant Itaipu hydroelectric dam on Brazil's border
with Paraguay.
"The system is designed to withstand two contingencies ... here we
had three," said Marcio Zimmermann, the ministry's executive
secretary.
But some energy experts questioned whether a storm could cause such
a widespread power outage in two countries.
Energy officials had originally blamed a failure at the Itaipu dam,
but the Itaipu Binacional company that runs the plant said in a
statement on Wednesday the problem originated elsewhere.
It said the dam, which supplies about 20% of Brazil's energy and
90% of Paraguay's, had been functioning normally but had not been
able to transmit energy because power lines were not working.
Zimmermann denied that the problem could have been caused by
computer hackers.
US television network CBS reported in its 60 Minutes programme
this month that blackouts in Brazil in 2005 and 2007 may have been
caused by cyber attacks, quoting mostly unnamed US intelligence
sources.
The massive power failure was already being politicised on daily
talk shows throughout Brazil, with opposition politicians accusing
the government of negligence in maintaining the country's
transmission lines.
Traffic chaos
The blackout on Tuesday affected 18 of Brazil's 26 states,
including the capital Brasilia, and left all of Paraguay in the
dark for about 15 minutes.
Paraguay's state electricity company said that the problem
originated in Brazilian power lines.
The last time Brazil suffered an outage on such a large scale was
1999, when a lightening bolt struck a transmission line in Sao
Paulo state.
Two years later, the government was forced to implement energy
rationing after a severe drought.
"The very long transmission lines in Brazil are very badly
maintained," said Adriano Pires, director of the Brazilian Center
for Infrastructure Studies, adding that the blackout was unlikely
to have been caused by bad weather.
"This shows that Brazil is very vulnerable. You can't leave a
country the size of Brazil hostage to accidents," he added.
Power was fully restored in Sao Paulo, Brazil's bustling financial
capital and South America's largest city, before dawn on
Wednesday.
Traffic on the streets of Sao Paulo descended into chaos shortly
after the power outage.
Thousands of passengers were forced to exit stalled subway
trains and walk along the tracks to get back to stations and make
their way to the surface.
The city's streets were still clogged early on Wednesday after the
mayor cancelled restrictions on the amount of cars allowed to
circulate during rush-hour traffic.
In Rio, the beachside city that will host the 2014 World Cup and
the 2016 Olympics, many tourists left their hotel rooms along
Copacabana beach because of the lack of air-conditioning and milled
around on the darkened streets.
