BRASILIA, (Reuters) – A massive blackout left as many as 53 million Brazilians in the dark late Thursday and early yesterday, the latest in a string of energy shortages that have raised questions about whether Brazil’s infrastructure is keeping pace with economic growth. Officials said a fire in a substation in the Amazon knocked out the whole northeastern electricity grid in the region’s worst blackout since 2001. The outage, which follows two other big blackouts in Brazil in as many months, lasted up to four hours in some places and brought major industries to a halt.
The blackouts come as soaring use of Brazil’s old infrastructure is congesting cities and major highways, causing delays and shutdowns at some of its biggest airports, and creating chronic logjams at seaports and railyards.
The problems have cast doubt on the country’s ability to accommodate economic growth in recent years and are prompting concerns Brazil will not be ready to host two major global sports events – the World Cup soccer tournament in 2014 and the 2016 Olympic Games.
“This is unacceptable for modern industrial production,” said Jos de F. Mascarenhas, head of the Federation of Industries of Bahia State, in the region darkened by Thursday’s failure. “It’s a disaster and it’s happening repeatedly.”
Bahia’s largest industry, petrochemicals, will not be able to restart for days, he added, lambasting the government for poor maintenance of transmission lines.
Meanwhile, residents across the 11 states hit by the blackout were left without air conditioning and ventilators. Many complained they could not sleep due to heat and mosquitoes.
Energy Minister Marcio Zimmerman, in comments to reporters yesterday, called the failure “a total collapse of the northeastern grid.” He said the recent woes are “not normal” and called the second emergency meeting in five weeks.
Two previous blackouts darkened Brasilia, the capital, and much of Brazil’s southeast, including parts of Sao Paulo, the country’s industrial and financial center. Though some government officials sought to characterize each outage as “isolated,” both blackouts created shortages that affected consumers in areas beyond the site of malfunction.
As such, critics are once again questioning the strength of an overall system that President Dilma Rousseff, as energy minister in a predecessor government, helped oversee and which she promotes in her bid to modernize Brazil’s economy.
