- ROME (Reuters) - Italy regained
most of its power on Sunday after a nationwide blackout hit virtually the
whole population in the dead of night, unleashing chaos, stalling lifts
and stranding thousands of travelers.
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- Only Three deaths were unofficially attributed to the
outage: a man killed in a traffic accident at an intersection where the
lights had failed, and two elderly woman who fell down stairs in the dark
in separate cases.
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- Almost all of the country's 57 million people were affected
-- a similar scale to last month's collapse in the U.S. Northeast and Canada.
But coming on a weekend night its initial impact was less dramatic and
caused less economic damage.
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- "It's chaos, and until the electricity comes back
on it will continue to be chaos," said policeman Fabio Bragazzi, 21,
at Rome's main Termini train station where passengers, among more than
30,000 stranded across the country, slept on the ground.
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- It was the fourth major Western blackout in two months,
after cuts in North America, parts of London and Scandinavia.
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- Sixteen hours after the blackout hit the exact cause
was not known, but Italy ruled out foul play. Italy, France and Switzerland
all sought to deflect blame for the outage, which spread through Italy
within four seconds and highlighted its reliance on power imports.
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- By Sunday evening, only a handful of the country's 103
provinces were still without some power, mostly in the south where some
water supplies were also cut.
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- But train services remained disrupted and many traffic
lights were out in central Rome, causing traffic jams. Civil Defense sent
text messages to mobile phones urging people not to use their cars or go
to train stations.
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- UPROOTED TREE
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- Authorities attributed the outage on a breakdown of electricity
lines, some in heavy storms, from France and Switzerland -- neighbors supplying
Italy some 17 percent of its power. But they disagreed on who was to blame.
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- Italy's national grid GRTN pointed to problems in the
Swiss and French networks. France blamed Italy and Switzerland.
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- Swiss power firm ATEL said a tree, uprooted by strong
winds, had knocked out a line carrying power to Italy over the Alps. But
it said that alone could not block power to all of Italy, and blamed Italy's
power grid for not reacting swiftly enough.
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- "The Italians had to react and according to our
information they did not react properly," ATEL spokesman Rolf Schmid
said.
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- Rome's underground railway was evacuated and the outage
marred a special "open night" in the city where shops, tourist
sites and museums were to stay open until daybreak.
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- Patrons in one Rome cafe without power to run the coffee
machine turned to liquor instead. "We're not happy at all," one
party-goer in Rome said.
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- Hundreds were trapped in elevators across the country.
But with most people asleep and emergency generators kicking in for hospitals
and key services, the impact was muted.
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- There was no estimate of overall losses, but retail trade
association Confcommercio said the food industry alone lost about 120 million
euros ($138 million) of business and frozen food.
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- Authorities said precautionary power cuts could hit about
five percent of households on Monday.
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- "EXTRAORDINARY EVENT"
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- Italy's worst blackout for nearly a decade, which struck
at 3:20 a.m. (0120 GMT), hit all Italy except the island of Sardinia and
some small pockets of the mainland, officials said.
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- "It was an exceptional, extraordinary event,"
Andrea Bollino, chairman of Italy's grid operator GRTN, told Reuters.
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- Power was expected to be up in all of Italy before Monday,
said Industry Minister Antonio Marzano, who urged the government to call
a vote of confidence on a bill to supply 12,000 more megawatts of power
-- one fourth of Italy's actual capacity.
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- But new plants face stiff opposition from environmentalists.
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- State-controlled airline Alitalia said airports continued
working, with only four domestic flights canceled.
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- About 110 trains carrying more than 30,000 passengers
were stranded when the power went out. Trains were held at the Swiss border
for more than 3-1/2 hours before power returned.
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- Some patients were transferred from private clinics to
public hospitals without incident, civil defense officials said.
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- Mobile phone services in many parts of the country were
down, while some newspapers could not publish.
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- The national grid operator said it was the biggest blackout
since 1994 in Italy, which suffered several outages this summer as temperatures
soared.
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- Italy has shunned nuclear power. Although it has pledged
to build more power stations, it will take years to fill the gap. (Additional
reporting by Rachel Sanderson in Rome, Svetlana Kovalyova, Emilio Parodi,
Antonella Ciancio in Milan)
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