Mega blackout left half of Brazil in darkness

The country’s giant blackout on Tuesday left at least 16 of Brazil’s 27 states completely in the dark and partially affected others. The states in the north and northeast of the country were hardest hit, where there was a complete blackout.

But the shutdown has also been felt in states to the south and southeast such as Santa Catarina, Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. People were trapped in elevators in cities across the country, subways in Sao Paulo, El Salvador and Belo Horizonte suffered failures and delays, and traffic lights stopped working in many cities.

In Terezina, the capital of the state of Piauí, one of the most affected cities in the northeast of the country, there was a complete power outage, companies and shops expelled their employees from their properties, traffic was in chaos, and ambulances moved at high speed. across the city to help people stuck in elevators or other emergencies. The outage began to be felt around 8:30 am local time, 12:30 pm in Lisbon, and continued over an hour later, at 9:45 am and 1:45 pm in the Portuguese capital.

A preliminary statement released by Mines and Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira said the mega outage was caused by an operational failure that has yet to be identified on one of the transmission lines. When the system tried to compensate for this failure by trying to redistribute energy from other regions, the entire system collapsed, he said.

Around 09:50 local time, 13:50 mainland Portugal time, some of the power began to recover, but until that time it was only a third of what was lost, which kept many cities across the country without electricity. States affected include Amazonas, Acre, Piauí, Amapa, Bahia, Paraiba, Pernambuco, Goiás, Minas Gerais, Maranhao, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Rio de Janeiro, Para, Ceara and Brasilia, and shortly before 10 am local time occurred there is no forecast when the situation will be fully resolved.