Brazilian President: massive blackout isolated incident
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Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva denied on Wednesday that there is an energy shortage in Brazil, stressing that the blackout which affected several states on Tuesday night was an isolated incident.
According to the President, the blackout was caused by a problem in the energy transmission lines, having nothing to do with energy generation.
He also denied that the problem was related to a lack of investments in the energy sector. According to Lula, his government invested 30 percent more in energy than the previous administrations.
President Lula also said that he will not assign blame before all facts are known. According to him, the authorities are working hard to discover the exact causes of the blackout, which lasted over four hours and affected 18 out of Brazil's 27 federation units, as well as most of the Paraguayan territory.
"It is important that no theories are made, that we wait until we have the facts in order to better inform society," he said.
Earlier in the day, the Ministry of Mines and Energy's Executive Secretary, Marcio Zimmermann, stated that adverse weather conditions were the cause of the massive blackout.
According to him, those weather conditions caused three transmission lines to collapse. Those lines take the energy from the Itaipu Power Plant, located in southern Parana state, to several states in the country.
Two of the collapsed transmission lines connect the town of Ivapora , in Parana state, to Itabera, in neighboring Sao Paulo state. The third one connects Itabera to Tijuco Preto, also in Sao Paulo state. The exact point of the lines in which the problems occurred has yet to be discovered.
According to Zimmermann, the collapse of the three transmission lines could not be prevented. He stressed that no system in the world is prepared to deal with a situation of triple contingency.
The blackout affected the entire states of Sao Paulo , Mato Grosso do Sul, Rio de Janeiro and Espirito Santo. Some areas in the states of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Goias, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Parana, Acre, Rondonia, Bahia, Sergipe, Paraiba, Alagoas, Pernambuco, and Rio Grande do Norte were affected as well.
In most states, there were no lingering effects of the blackout. In Rio de Janeiro , Sao Paulo and Espirito Santo, however, the water distribution has been affected; the states' local water companies informed that the water distribution will only be normalized on Thursday.
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