It was 25 years ago that a stork crashed into a high voltage line in Figueira and left the country dark for two hours. It was not an isolated case.
We still don’t know for sure why, but Portugal and Spain were out of power this Monday, April 28, for several hours.
Despite being considered “one of the biggest electrical system failures in recent years” in the EU, Monday’s fright was not the only one in history.
The Stork
In 2000, a stork provoked a blackout By shocking a high voltage line in Lavos, in Figueira da Foz.
The incident occurred at 10:00 pm on May 9 and resulted in about two hours of darkness to half the country. It all worsened with an EDP automatic protection system failure, which caused the short circuit to spread. António Guterres, at the time Prime Minister, launched an inquiry into the case of stork.
Lack of connections and human error in Germany
Three years later, in August 2003, new power cuts affected the districts of Évora, Beja and Faro. The problem originated from fires that damaged electric lines between Palmela and Sines, critical points of the transport network. The vulnerability of the Portuguese power grid was such that Ren warned urgent need to create new callsnamely to Spain, in order to ensure greater resilience, recalls the.
In 2006, Portugal again faced a blackout, this time due to a fault in thousands of kilometers in Germany. A human error of the E.on company, when disabled an electric line to allow the passage of a cruise on the EMS river, triggered a cascade of failures in the European network. The Iberian Peninsula, strongly dependent on the French connections, was directly affected.
The hydroavião
Already in 2021, an accident with a hydroavião in France resulted in one of the most significant blackouts so far. On July 24, between 4:30 pm and 6:30 pm, the fall of two 400 kV lines, associated with a fire, separated the European power grid in two zones: the Iberian Peninsula and part of the French Southeast suffered a critical subfrequency, while the rest of Europe experienced overfrequently, he remembers.
The power cut not only affected Portugal and Spain, but also several French regions. In Portugal, it was even committed to the operation of the national emergency number-112.
North America and Moscow in the dark
In 2006, for example, Europe watched an event where about 15 million citizens from France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain were without electricity for approximately two hours.
But One of the greatest blackouts in history It was outside the European space. On August 14, 2003, about 50 million people in the United States and Canada were dark. The incident originated in Ohio, where the failure of three high voltage lines, not detected by the automatic system, triggered a chain reaction.
Em 2005, Moscow He also faced a massive blackout due to failures in the Unified Energy System of Russia, paralyzing the capital in various sectors, from transport to communications.
