Regions remain without power six hours after Brazil blackout

Nearly six hours after the onset of one of the largest power outages in the country’s history on Tuesday afternoon, Brazil was still left with vast regions without power and others with intermittent power.

The first reports of a power outage came around 8:20 local time (12:20 in Lisbon), and at 14:10 Brazilian time, Lula da Silva’s government acknowledged that the situation had not yet been fully resolved.

At that time at 18:10 in Lisbon, according to the Ministry of Mines and Energy, the states of the south, southeast and central west had already restored power, and there were still important setbacks in the states of the north and northeast.

In the northeast, supply had already been restored in about 85% of the cities by that time, but in the north, in the vast region where the states of Akko, Amapa, Para, Amazonas and Rondonia are located, the supply was still at 41%.

One of the most disturbing situations occurred in the city of Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas, where, for example, the vast majority of hospitals do not have generators, and the metropolis has more than 2.5 million inhabitants.

Porto Velho, the capital of Rondonia, and Rio Branco, the capital of Acre, other large cities in the Amazon region, were at that time in a similar position.

Even in the southern and southeastern regions, where the largest Brazilian metropolitan areas such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte are located, despite the fact that the energy supply was fully restored, there were still problems.

Energy continued to suffer from fluctuations, with large consumers such as large enterprises receiving less energy than needed.

Tuesday’s mega blackout affected 26 of Brazil’s 27 states in whole or in part. Only the state of Roraima, in the far north of the country, on the border with the Amazon, is not taken into account, the only one not included in the unified electricity distribution system, where the supply comes from gas and coal-fired power plants. places.

Throughout those hours, millions of Brazilians were unable to work or do housework, traffic lights were off, many people were stuck in elevators, and everything was in chaos.

Transport that depends on energy, such as surface and subway trains, has ground to a halt or drastically slowed down across the country, and only in the coming days can a more realistic assessment be made of victims surprised by power outages during operations. , for example, and losses of all kinds, such as loss of goods and production failures.

Until noon this Tuesday, Lula da Silva’s government had yet to come up with a convincing explanation for the gigantic power outage, attributed to a technical malfunction that has yet to be clarified.

The opposition wasted no time and remembered another major blackout that occurred in 2009, when Lula da Silva was also President of Brazil, and is already demanding the creation of a commission of inquiry in Congress.