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Blackout raises doubts over Brazil infrastructure
Wed Nov 11, 2009 12:58pm EST
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By Eduardo Simoes
SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazil's president denied on Wednesday that underinvestment was to blame for the worst power outage in a decade, which left a huge swath of the country in the dark for more than five hours and raised doubts about the reliability of its energy infrastructure.
The blackout on Tuesday night left tens of millions of people without power across most of the country's wealthy southeastern region, halting subways and snarling traffic in major cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva summoned his energy minister, Edison Lobao, for an urgent meeting in the capital Brasilia on Wednesday to explain what triggered the outage.
Energy officials said it was likely caused when a storm downed three transmission lines carrying power from the giant Itaipu hydroelectric dam on Brazil's border with Paraguay, which supplies about 20 percent of Brazil's energy and 90 percent of Paraguay's.
"We didn't have a failure in the generation of energy, we had a problem in the transmission line," Lula told reporters in Brasilia.
He said his government had invested over the past seven years 30 percent as much in transmission lines as had been invested over the 120 preceding years.
Brazil's economy has forged ahead in recent years under former union leader Lula and was quick to shrug off the global financial crisis. But transport and energy infrastructure remain weak points for the country that will host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games two years later.
"The very long transmission lines in Brazil are very badly maintained," said Adriano Pires, director of the Brazilian Center for Infrastructure Studies, adding that the blackout was unlikely to have been caused by bad weather.
"This shows that Brazil is very vulnerable. You can't leave a country the size of Brazil hostage to accidents," he added.
An energy ministry official told Reuters the outage was triggered because the system was not equipped to cope with three lines being downed.
"The system is designed to withstand two contingencies ... here we had three," said Marcio Zimmermann, the ministry's executive secretary.
Zimmermann denied that the problem could have been caused by computer hackers. U.S. television network CBS reported in its "60 Minutes" program this month that blackouts in Brazil in 2005 and 2007 may have been caused by "cyber attacks," quoting mostly unnamed U.S. intelligence sources.
The massive power failure was already being politicized on daily talk shows throughout Brazil, with opposition politicians accusing the government of negligence in maintaining the country's transmission lines.
TRAFFIC CHAOS
The blackout on Tuesday affected 18 of Brazil's 26 states, including the capital Brasilia, and left all of Paraguay in the dark for about 15 minutes. Paraguay's state electricity company said that the problem originated in Brazilian power lines. Continued...
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