List of power outages
This is a
list of famous wide-scale power outages
- The Northeast Blackout of 1965 on November 9, 1965.
- The New York City Blackout of July 13-14, 1977, resulted in looting and rioting.
- The Great Storm of October 1987 brought down power lines throughout southern England causing extensive blackouts.
- On March 13, 1989, a solar storm caused the HydroQuebec power failure which left 6 million people without power for 9 or more hours.
- The 1998 power failures in Auckland, New Zealand.
- During the California electricity crisis there were regular power failures due to energy shortages and market manipulation resulting from failed deregulation.
- On August 14, 2003, there was a wide-area power failure in the northeast of the USA as well as in parts of Canada, affecting 50 million people: see 2003 US-Canada blackout.
- There was a 2003 London blackout on August 28 which won worldwide headlines such as "Power cut cripples London" but in fact only affected 0.5 million people.
- On September 23, 2003, a power failure affected 4 or 5 million people in Denmark and southern Sweden.
- On September 27-28, 2003, a power failure affected all of Italy except Sardinia, cutting service to 57 million people.
The fact that the four most recent blackouts occurred in different parts of the world in rapid succession has drawn the attention of governments to the vulnerability of power grids to technical failures and to the possibility of
terrorist attacks against them.
See also
