Rome, Sept 28: Power was gradually returning across Italy at midday today, after the country was hit by the worst power outage in its history, leaving tens of thousands of people stranded on trains and elevators for hours and causing havoc with the telecommunications network. Only the island of Sardinia was unaffected by the nationwide outage, which left about 50 million of Italy's 57 million inhabitants without power from about 3:30 am (0700 IST) and up to 30,000 passengers blocked in trains across the country.
Hospitals nationwide switched to emergency generators following the cut, which came just six weeks after the worst blackout in American history and also followed outages in London as well as Sweden and Denmark. In Milan and Rome, passengers were trapped in subway tunnels as escalators and lifts ground to a halt.
Television footage showed people blundering around in the dark, notably in the capital where ironically, a so-called "white night" of round-the-clock cultural festivities – an extravaganza of art events -- turned into a black night for millions. A spokesman for the Italian National Grid said it had lost control of the network in just four seconds, leading to a disastrous "domino effect" that cut off electricity nationwide. Bureau Report