Izpad elektricne energije

[Max]

No, da samo priblizno obnovimo, kar se da po spominu in

je Ice-va metla ponesreci odnesla:

Ajs, think twice this time before you sweep tonight

No, glej ga zlomka v dveh tednih po ZDA brez elektricne energije

ostal se London!?!

Rush hour power cut hits London

Thursday, August 28, 2003 Posted: 2:42 PM EDT (1842 GMT)

LONDON, England -- Passengers were trapped on the London Underground

as a power outage struck the city during evening rush hour Thursday.

A blackout that brought London's transport system

to a halt and left half-a-million commuters stranded is being

described as out of the ordinary by the company that runs Britain's

main power lines.

Ken Livingstone said Friday the outage could have had "horrifying

consequences" had it happened during the heat wave earlier in August

instead of on a cold, rainy evening.

Electricity was restored to London within an hour of the outage, which

was blamed on a failure in the National Grid.

London Underground and mainline rail services were badly affected but

by Friday morning, most overground and underground trains were running

normally again.

Livingstone estimated that 250,000 people were caught in the London

Underground when the outage hit at about 6:15 p.m. (1:15 p.m. ET) on

Thursday as commuters were heading home from work.

Another quarter of a million people were affected when parts of the

mainline rail system came to a halt, he said.

"Think how much worse it would have been if it had been a month ago

at the height of the heat wave," Livingstone told.

"We are being told that it was a "one off" and that it would never

happen again, but I want absolute assurance quite frankly."

Livingstone said it is possible the problem could be blamed on "that

great wave of privatization that went round the world."

"All the utilities were flogged off, big share options for the boys

at the top, but not the investment in modern infrastructure that you

need. ... The lack of investment, I think, is bordering on the criminal."

Thousands of people took to rain-soaked streets as dusk approached and

pubs were packed with stranded commuters in scenes reminiscent of the

blackout that hit North America earlier this month.

A spokesman for London Underground said 60 percent of the metro system

had been affected, including most services in central London.

French-owned electricity network operator EDF Energy said power was out

for about 40 minutes before it returned at about 7 p.m.

EDF spokesman Gareth Wynn said the problem originated in two

high-voltage lines belonging to the National Grid that help supply an

area of south London, The Associated Press reported.

British energy regulator Ofgem said the fault lay with National Grid

Transco, which runs Britain's power lines. On Friday shares in National

Grid were trading about 0.5 percent lower at 0700 GMT on Friday than in

the previous session at 392 pence.

"There was a fault on a transformer system. There was loss of power for

34 minutes, but London Electricity has re-energized the system and it's

back on," Reuters quoted an Ofgem spokesman as saying.

National Grid said the outage was "not even vaguely on the scale of

what happened in the U.S."

National Grid's U.S. business Niagara Mohawk was among those hardest hit

by the blackouts that struck the east coast of North America earlier this month.