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`White Night' ends in dark morning

Vittorio Emanuele monument is seen at sunrise during yesterday power outage in Rome. PHOTO: REUTERS

Power went out across Italy yesterday morning, stranding riders in subway cars, disrupting travel nationwide and cutting short an all-night festival in Rome.

There was no official tally of customers without power, but early reports indicated most of Italy's 58 million people could be affected.

Italy's state broadcaster said the problem may have originated in France, but that was later proven incorrect.

Italian authorities said the near simultaneous failure of power lines from neighboring Switzerland and France, which provides about one fifth of Italy's electricity at night, triggered the cut at 3:20am.

"It was an exceptional, extraordinary event," Andrea Bollino, chairman of national grid operator GRTN, said.

"There was a problem with the connection in Switzerland which then caused a problem with our connection with France and then affected Italy," Bollino said.

French authorities said severe storms apparently cut two 400,000 volt lines connecting the two countries. On Sunday morning the two lines were reconnected, restoring power to large parts of northern and central Italy.

"The origin of the main failure is not French. There was a failure between Switzerland and Italy around 3am," said Patrick Larradet, a spokesman for French grid operator RTE.

The first outages were reported around 4am in Rome, where the city was celebrating an all-night festival with museums and restaurants open around the clock.

Later, the national electricity company ACEA said power was out everywhere except on the island of Sardinia, the ANSA news agency reported.

More than 110 trains were stopped with 30,000 passengers on board, and hundreds of people attending the all-night ``White Night'' festivities in Rome were stuck in subways, ANSA said. Italian television showed darkened streets and stranded travelers sleeping in a subway station.

By mid-morning, electricity was beginning to return to some parts of Venice, Milan and other northern cities. However, rural areas and all regions south of Rome remained completely out of power. Diesel locomotives were towing stranded electric trains to the nearest stations.

``In certain parts of the city, electricity has already returned,'' said civil defense official Pasquale Aversa. ``Given the situation we're in, it's going well.''

He added that hospitals and other emergency centers were using generators. Top civil defense officials will likely hold a meeting in Rome on the matter soon, Aversa said, but he had no further details.

The Italian state broadcaster RAI said the problem was believed to have originated in France and caused a domino effect throughout Italy. Italy depends on France for some of its power.

Power also went out for about three hours in Geneva, Switzerland earlier in the night, but it was unclear if it was related to the Italian outage.
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