Blackout blamed on a tree cripples Italy; 57 million without power and at least three people dead.
((((You know, you can't make this kind of shit up!!!))))
TOM RACHMAN
Canadian Press
Sunday, September 28, 2003
CREDIT: (AP/Gregorio Borgia)
ROME (AP) - Italy's power grid collapsed Sunday and caused chaos across the country that left at least three people dead. Thousands of other Italians were stuck on trains, cars zoomed by unlit traffic lights, and hospitals relied on emergency generators to run crucial equipment.
All but a few of Italy's 57 million people were affected by what experts said was probably the worst outage here since the Second World War.
Amazingly, the havoc may have been sparked by little more than a tree that damaged a power line in Switzerland supplying Italy via France. The outage also highlighted how vulnerable Italy's energy source is, with scant domestic supply and swelling public demand.
The blackout hit at 3:25 a.m. local time, with power out everywhere except the island of Sardinia. Electricity came back by early morning in northern Italy, in most of Rome shortly after noon, while swaths of southern Italy only got the power back late Sunday night.
In southern Italy, three elderly women died in the dark, the ANSA news agency said.
Two women - one 81 years old and the other 72 - died in separate incidents when they fell down darkened stairs, the agency said. A 92-year-old woman died of burns after a candle she held in the dark set her clothes on fire.
In most cases, however, the fallout of the power failure was huge inconvenience and fear.
Lonia Liscio, a 21-year-old babysitter, was in Rome asleep with an eight-year-old child when the blackout came. The outage tripped the burglar alarm, and Liscio woke up in a panic.
"The baby woke up too - he sleeps with the light on," she said. "He took out a flashlight and was up all night long. I was scared. I didn't know what was happening."
Tommaso Primavera, 17, was cruising down the street on his motor scooter at the time.
"There was panic on the streets," he said. "The tourists went mad - everyone was thinking about themselves."
The cause of the blackout was still being investigated.
Italian and Swiss power officials cited a pre-dawn problem in Switzerland and France, apparently sparked when tree branches blown by a strong wind touched and disabled a power line. The French supplier, meanwhile, said the cause was still unclear.
Whatever the cause, the blackout was an ordeal across Italy.
Some 110 trains were stopped across the country with 30,000 passengers on board, while numerous flights were delayed and a handful cancelled.
Hospitals relied on generators, which was crucial for one man undergoing a liver transplant in Turin. The blackout occurred during his six-hour overnight surgery, but emergency power helped doctors pull off the operation successfully, the ANSA news agency reported.
When power cut out in Rome, the city was holding an all-night festival with museums, bars and shops open into the wee hours. City officials had encouraged partygoers to take public transport, but many found themselves stranded in out-of-service subway stations.
The Vatican was also affected, with St. Peter's Basilica - normally lit up overnight - in darkness. When Pope John Paul delivered his weekly address, the Vatican had to amplify his remarks with a backup generator, while journalists huddled with candles and flashlights in the Holy See press office.
The fact that the blackout happened in the slow-moving morning hours of a Sunday at least lessened the effect. The outages might not be over, however, with the national grid operator warning that it might carry out brief electricity cuts in parts of the country Monday as it struggles to return power to normal.
In Switzerland, a spokesman for the Atel power company said a 380,000-volt transmission line that transports power through central Switzerland to Italy stopped working after it was hit by the tree, causing another transmission line in Switzerland to fail when it became overloaded.
This in turn caused two French transmission lines to drop, Atel spokesman Rolf Schmid said. "After that, all connections to Italy dropped out," he said.
Italian energy company Enel agreed with the Swiss assessment. "Electrical energy was lost first from Switzerland and then from France," said Enel CEO Paolo Scaroni.
France's electricity grid operator RTE said it was too early to speculate about causes.
"We don't have all the elements yet," RTE spokesman Patrick Larradet said. "This is an extremely complicated phenomenon to understand."
Notably, the Swiss and French power companies cast blame on Italy. Outages of individual lines are nothing out of the ordinary, the Swiss said, charging that the problem boiled down to lack of co-ordination.
"Because of the high volume of exported power to Italy, it is vital that the network operators can be quickly co-ordinated and react correctly," Atel said in a statement.
Italian officials acknowledged that the domestic energy system was gravely insufficient.
Enel energy company spokesman Ralph Traviato said Italy imports up to 17 per cent of its energy, compared with a European average of about two per cent. He noted that Italy's own production is reduced overnight, meaning that any late-night problem from international suppliers has a magnified effect.
Some Italians have fought against having new power plants built here, worrying that they could damage the environment. Also, national demand has shot up in recent years, prompting energy officials to warn repeatedly that blackouts could come.
"I would like my fellow citizens to know that we must build new plants and networks on our territory or the situation will remain the same," Enel chief Scaroni said.
President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi urged that "we must not slow down the construction of new power plants."
Italy was hit with partial power cuts in June, when people - suffering in the scorching summer - overloaded the system with air conditioners and other electricity-guzzling appliances. That was the first time in more than 20 years that the national operator of the electrical grid ordered power cuts.
Last week, nearly four million people in eastern Denmark and southern Sweden were without electricity for more than three hours after a rare power outage.
A blackout hit parts of the United States and parts of Canada on Aug. 14, affecting 50 million people. On Aug. 28, power briefly went out in parts of London and southeast England.
© Copyright 2003 The Canadian Press
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