12 November 2009 / REUTERS, SAO PAULO
A major electricity outage left tens of millions of people in Brazil’s two largest cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro without power on Tuesday night due to problems at the massive Itaipu dam that straddles its border with Paraguay.
The blackout affected at least six of Brazil’s 26 states, hitting the industrialized southeastern part of the country especially hard. All of Paraguay, which gets most of its energy from the dam, was also briefly left in the dark. Three hours after the blackout, power was beginning to be restored in some parts of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s financial capital and South America’s largest city. But most of the sprawling metropolis remained in the dark. “The exact cause still isn’t known, but we suspect that atmospheric problems, an intense storm, may have contributed to or caused the transmission lines to Itaipu to shut down,” Brazil’s energy minister, Edison Lobao, told reporters in Brasilia, the capital. In Paraguay, the power cut blacked out the whole country for up to 15 minutes but electricity was soon restored, an Asuncion resident said.
