Power gradually returns to Italy after worst blackout

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, September 29, 2003

Power gradually returns to Italy after worst blackout

Electricity was gradually restored across Italy on Sunday after a eight-hour power outage plunging the whole country into darkness except the island of Sardinia.

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Electricity was gradually restored across Italy on Sunday after a eight-hour power outage plunging the whole country into darkness except the island of Sardinia.

Electricity supply had been returned to northern part of the country by around 8:00 a.m. local time, including Italy's two economic centers Turin and Milan, and the capital city of Rome also saw lights back on around midday, earlier reports said.

Guido Bertolasi, head of the civil protection services, said after an emergency meeting that the situation was under control and power could be fully restored by later afternoon.

He said the government immediately guaranteed power supply to essential infrastructures like hospitals, fire services and police offices.

A power outage swept across Italy about 3:30 a.m. Sunday, leaving tens of thousands of people stranded on trains and elevators for hours and causing nationwide chaos.

About 50 million of Italy's 57 million population were affectedin the blackout, the worst of such accidents in the country's history.

Although earlier reports said the Italian grid lost about 6,000megawatts of powers coming from France, yet a French official strongly denied responsibility for the blackout.

France's electricity grid operator Reseau de Transport de l'Electricite said an early investigation showed that a disabled power line in Switzerland set off the chain reaction of outages behind the massive blackout in Italy.

The statement is contradictory to earlier reports saying that powerful storms near the French-Italian border may be the cause ofthe blackout.

Italian officials, however, said it was too early to give exact explanation for the outage.

The blackout in Italy is just one of the recent power failures worldwide.

Last week power went out in eastern Denmark and southern Sweden for more than three hours, affecting nearly 4 million people.

On August 14, the northern and eastern United States and parts of Canada were hit strongly by a massive blackout, which caused trouble to 50 million people and paralyzed more than 100 power plants.

Only two weeks later, a brief outage shut off traffic lights inLondon and southeastern England, and stranded hundreds of thousands of people in subways and trains.

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