Brazil’s big blackout: 15 Minutes on Latin America
In today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern:
Sixty million people lost electricity yesterday in Brazil after a huge power grid failure. The entire country of Paraguay was also affected by the blackout. Photos here
Will this affect the Olympics?
Update
Commenting on Facebook, Dominick reminds us of Brazil’s national motto, “ORDEM E PROGRESSO”.
So much for that.
UPDATE 2
Jungle Mom, writing from Paraguay describes the Power outages
Tags: Brazil blackout, electricity, Fausta's blog
November 12th, 2009 at 9:34 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Fausta, Fausta. Fausta said: Brazil’s big blackout: 15 Minutes on Latin America http://ff.im/-blTgO [...]
November 12th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Hrmmm. These things are inevitable as a country develops. The USA has had three of them in the last 50 years, you know –
1965
1977
2003
November 12th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Ob,
Not to trivialize three huge outages in half a century, but we’re talking about “It is at least the fourth time since 1985 that Brazil has suffered a massive power outage involving transmission lines from Itaipu.”
November 12th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Yet another Brazilian wisecrack that can best describe this situation:
“Brazil is the country of the future and will always be.”
November 13th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Two of those outages in the US were actually when parts of the Canadian system went down and the latter from tree branches. While the most current Brazilian outage caused 60 million to be without powere that figure doesn’t include some 10 million in Paraguay that also were lighting candles. But one of the main problems in Brazil is that in the larger cities some 25% of the delivered power is stolen and the quality of these illegal hookups is horrendous.
November 16th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
[...] week’s posts and podcasts Mexico: Amlo’s pretend government Brazil’s big blackout: 15 Minutes on Latin America Blackout in Venezuela: 15 Minutes on Latin America OAS calls emergency meeting on [...]