A massive power failure blacked out Brazil’s two largest cities and other parts of Latin America’s biggest nation for more than two hours late on Tuesday, leaving millions of people in the dark after a huge hydroelectric dam suddenly went offline. All of neighboring Paraguay also lost power, but for only about 20 minutes.
The huge Itaipu dam straddling the two nations’ border stopped producing 17,000 megawatts of power, resulting in outages in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and at least several other big Brazilian cities, Brazilian Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao said.
He said outages hit nine of the 27 states in a country of more than 190 million people.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The cause of the failure had not been determined, but Lobao said strong storms uprooted trees near the Itaipu dam just before it went offline and could be to blame. Rio was the hardest hit city, he said.
At 12:37am yesterday, the lights in Rio’s Copacabana neighborhood flashed back to life, prompting cheers and thunderous car honking.
“It’s sad to see such a beautiful city with such a precarious infrastructure,” said Igor Fernandes, a shirtless 22-year-old law student pedaling his bike down a dark Copacabana beach. “This shouldn’t happen in a city that is going to host the Olympic Games.”
Lobao said the hydro plant at the dam itself was working, but there were problems with the power lines that carry electricity across Brazil. Brazil uses almost all of the energy produced by the dam, and Paraguay consumes the rest.
In Paraguay, the national energy agency blamed the blackout on a short-circuit at an electrical station near Sao Paulo, saying that failure shut down the entire power grid supplied by Itaipu. All of Paraguay went dark for about 20 minutes, the nation’s leading newspaper, ABC Color, reported.
Itaipu Binacional, the firm in charge of the dam, said the blackout did not start at the hyrdoelectric complex. It said the most likely cause was a failure at one or more points in the transmission system.
The blackouts came three days after CBS’s 60 Minutes news program reported that several past Brazilian power outages were caused by hackers. Brazilian officials had played down the report before the latest outages, and Lobao did not mention it.
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