SCANDANAVIA: A power failure struck southern Sweden and eastern Denmark yesterday, leaving up to an estimated five million people without electricity and crippling industry, airports, trains and bridges.
Power went out in the early afternoon, including at two Swedish nuclear power plants. The national grids of the two countries began restoring electricity within a few hours, but after five hours, many Danes were still without electricity.
The blackout, highly unusual in Scandinavia, follows a huge outage that left 50 million North Americans without power for up to two days and a shutdown which paralysed London for several hours, both last month.
The company that runs the Swedish grid said the exact cause of the failure was unknown, but the firm was studying a storm that hit a power line and which quickly put heavy pressure on the system. - (Reuters)