Majority of the world’s worst blackouts occurred
because of technical faults and human errors, but natural disasters have also
taken their toll. Don't let power failures affect your home or business! Off Grid has a wide variety of back up power solutions, from UPS devices to power banks. Here are the 7 biggest
power failures that have happened around the world:
It took months before the real cause of the
Northeast Blackout of 2003 was finally determined. What actually happened was a
high-voltage power line in Northern Ohio brushed against overgrown trees,
causing it to shut down. When the alarm system failed, the incident was
ignored. In the next 90 minutes, system operators tried to figure out what
happened while three other lines switched off as a consequence of the first
line's failure.
50 million people were inconvenienced for
up to two days in what turned out to be the biggest blackout in North American
history. 11 people died and there was a reported $6 billion in damages. The
incident prompted the creation of a joint task force between the U.S. and
Canada to minimise future blackouts.
Italy's 2003 blackout affected almost all
of the country's 57 million people. Usually a middle-of-the-night power outage
means that few people will notice it. However, this event occurred during the
early morning hours after an all-night arts festival. Because of this, trains
were still running at 3:01 a.m. when a fault on the Swiss power system caused
the overloading of two internal lines near to the Italian border. About 110
trains carrying more than 30,000 passengers were stranded as a result.
At 10:23 a.m. on a Thursday morning, a
failure in a 500 kilovolt transmission line between Cilegon and Saguling in
West Java cut electricity supplies, leading to a massive 5,000 megawatt
shutdown. Jakarta, lost power, and half of the Indonesian population — 100
million people — were without electricity for almost 11 hours.
When German power company switched off a
high-voltage line across the River Ems in order to let a cruise ship pass,
10-15 million Europeans lost power. The company said that the problems began in
north-western Germany when its network became overloaded, possibly due to that
manual switch off (although transmission lines had been shut down in the past
without incident). The blackouts stopped trains in Germany and trapped dozens
of people in elevators in France and Italy. Austria, Belgium, and Spain were
also affected by the outage.
Winter storms resulted in a nearly two-week
blackout for 4.6 million people around the central Chinese city of Chenzhou. Frustratingly,
many citizens were without power during Chinese New Year celebrations. Some residents
told reporters that they had to walk one kilometre to a well and back in
freezing temperatures just to procure water. The official Xinhua News Agency said
11 electricians died while working to restore power, and the storm's death
toll exceeded 60.
When a hydroelectric dam on the
Paraguay-Brazil border suddenly stopped producing 17,000 megawatts of power,
outages quickly spread through both countries. Suspiciously, the blackouts came
two days after 60 Minutes reported that previous Brazilian power
outages were caused by hackers. The CBS news magazine would later report that
the 2009 incident was also the work of hackers.
In the largest electrical outage in history
(so far), the July 31st blackout of India affected an area encompassing about
670 million people, which is around 9% of the world’s population. On the 31st,
three of the country’s interconnected northern power grids collapsed for
several hours, affecting 22 states from the country's Eastern border with
Myanmar to its western border with Pakistan.
Don’t let blackouts
ever affect you – contact Off Grid today and purchase a backup power solution
today!
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