Britain's beleaguered transport system creaked back into action yesterday after a massive power failure paralyzed London and left 500,000 commuters stranded.
Thursday's half-hour blackout at the height of the evening rush hour echoed the chaos that gripped New York earlier this month and provoked the fury of London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who called the National Grid power cut "an absolute disgrace."
PHOTO: AFP
But by yesterday morning, trains were up and running again.
A spokesman for Network Rail, which carries 400,000 commuters into London every morning from southern England, said: "Everything is back to normal. Things are running very well."
A spokesman for The London Underground, which runs over 500 trains at peak hours and carries 3 million passengers a day, said: "All lines started up following the power failure. There are delays on a few lines, but those are for reasons unrelated to yesterday's power cuts."
The mayor of this city of 8 million people was enraged by the chaos that gripped the British capital.
"The grid should never have gone down for that length of time," Livingstone said.
"You have to ask why it is that a country which is the fourth richest in the world can't invest enough in its power supply to maintain power," he added.
Passengers were trapped on underground trains, railway stations were closed and thousands of frustrated travellers took to the rain-soaked streets in a dismal trudge home.
National Grid Transco, the privatized company which runs Britain's main power lines, said the blackout was caused by two faults happening in quick succession.
Chief operating officer Mark Fairbairn said the blackout was a freak event and not due to a failure to invest in the system.
"The unusual event last night was two faults occurring quickly together," he told BBC Radio. "It's got nothing to do with under-investment. The levels of investment made by the National Grid are four or five times higher than the investments made before privatization."
While much of Britain suffers periodic outages when storms hit power lines, the nation's capital, where cables are mainly underground, has avoided the most disruptive blackouts since miners' strikes plunged London homes into darkness in 1974.
As for British commuters, they are wearily philosophical about trains plagued by delays, deadly rail crashes and a creaking infrastructure suffering from decades of neglect.
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