Italy's White Night Turns Dark

September 29, 2003
By Daniel Williams

ROME -- Italy slowly came to life Sunday morning after an electrical blackout darkened the country from the Alps to the tip of Sicily, stranding railroad travelers, disrupting traffic, upending communications and, in some places, water supplies.

The massive outage, which affected most of the country's 57 million people, spared only the island of Sardinia, whose energy is locally produced. In Rome, the sudden blackout put a dramatic end to an all-night citywide festival. Tens of thousands of Romans and tourists had filled downtown streets to attend concerts and to crowd into museums, where admission was free of charge during the White Night fete. At about 3:30 a.m., city lights went out and crowds wandered aimlessly in the eerie darkness. Rain poured, adding to the mass discomfort.

"White Night turned dark," said Nino Calabresi, who had traveled from Milan with friends for the occasion. "Our Italy is like this."

Italian officials discounted the possibility of sabotage, but the exact cause of the outage was unclear. Italy buys about 16 percent of its electricity from France, and somewhere between the two countries, the main high-tension line ruptured and a backup system failed, Italian officials said. At first, French energy officials blamed it on a breakdown inside Italy. The Italians blamed the French. By morning, they agreed that the outage probably began in Switzerland, perhaps rebounding into France, where an electrical storm also might have disrupted the heavy-duty lines. A small area of Switzerland also lost power.

In any event, the reduction of power had a "domino effect" on Italy's power grid, which was unable to isolate the power loss to a single region, said Andrea Bollini, who heads Italy's electrical grid agency. He compared the grid to a boat: "One hole and it all sinks."

Power returned unevenly throughout the morning. It was restored first in northern Italy, where hydroelectric power began to take up the slack. Then parts of the south returned to normal, then Tuscany and shortly after noon, Rome. By dawn, some electric trains that had stalled on tracks across the country had been pulled back into stations by diesel locomotive, opening blocked thoroughfares. Still, by mid-afternoon, 50 percent of scheduled trains were inoperative. Several southern towns were still without power as evening arrived.

Fifty million people in the United States and Canada were affected by a blackout on Aug. 14 whose precise cause remains undetermined. Parts of Denmark and Sweden suffered a brief power failure last week that affected several million people, while London and southeast England had a short outage on Aug. 28 that stranded commuters and snarled traffic. Economic losses in Italy will probably be negligible due to the weekend, pre-dawn timing of the blackout.

The blackout, the most massive such event in almost a decade, immediately raised questions about the state of Italy's infrastructure. Heavy debt and pension outlays have reduced the scope of government spending on utilities. The signature public works programs of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government are focused on two gigantic projects: dike construction to control flooding in Venice and a bridge from Italy's toe to Sicily. Government spokesman Paolo Bonaiuti tried to forestall criticism, saying, "The time for polemics is later."

But Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the country's ceremonial president, took the opportunity to plead for an end to "dissension" over construction of new power plants to reduce dependence on foreign sources.

Members of the leftist opposition Green Party dismissed the appeal for more power plants, insisting that modernizing the grid was all that was needed. Left-wing parties have shunned construction of nuclear power plants in Italy. Atomic energy provides most of France's power needs with enough surplus to sell to Italy.

Excess demand was not the problem in Sunday morning's blackout. Electrical use at the time was only about 40 percent of the average daily demand, officials said.

Most Italian cities remained calm overnight. A few stores in Turin were vandalized. Across the country, overnight travelers bunked down at railway stations awaiting a backlog of late trains to arrive. Water supplies in mountainous areas near the western seaside town of Ancona and in southern Italy were cut as electrical pumps stalled. Farmers feared for spoiled milk. Hospitals generally kept running on generators, although in Naples, a few generators malfunctioned and patients were stranded in elevators.

The most striking scenes of disruption occurred in Rome. The city government had organized the White Night festival to enliven this late September weekend. City officials estimated the turnout at 500,000 partygoers. While most of Italy slept, central Piazza Venezia and the boulevard that leads to the Coliseum were packed with strollers. Lines of visitors awaiting entry to the city's multitude of museums stretched around city blocks. Gawkers packed buses and the subway system. Mayor Walter Veltroni interviewed for special Saturday night editions of the city's newspapers said he was "proud" of Rome and that the city "deserved more respect."

Then it all came to a halt. At the Termini central train station, a rock concert was noisily underway and a dense mob hopped about under bright klieg lights. The lights went out, the dancing came to an end and couples searched for each other in the dark. "First, I thought it was part of the act. Then I thought maybe it was terrorism. Then I thought about my girl. People were going up to one another real close to see if they could recognize each other," said Fabio Cavalli, from the Roman suburb of Cassilina. He found her at a bus stop where they had previously agreed to meet. With the lights out, the space in Termini that had been a dance floor soon became a camp ground, with youths sprawled atop one another seeking relief from the night chill.

By dawn, glassy-eyed ex-revelers staggered out of Termini looking for a cup of coffee. Espresso machines were immobilized by the power disruption. "This is the maximum," said Fiorella Grassi, a teenager from Anzio, south of Rome. "I can't go on without coffee. Somebody turn on the electricity, please."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13101-2003Sep28.html