7. November 10th, 2006 Brazil and Paraguay Blackout – 60 Million Affected
On November 10th, a severe storm caused three transformers to short circuit and cut the high voltage line that they were on. This caused the Itaipu Dam to shut down for the first time and caused a loss of 14 GW of power. The lines that connected Itaipu to Paraguay’s Yacyreta Dam failed immediately after and plunged the entire country into darkness. For Brazil, 18 out of 26 states lost power including the major cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The power outage only lasted about two hours.
Three days prior to the outage 60 Minutes did a story that suggested that most of the blackouts were caused by hackers. This story was largely ignored by Brazilian officials but it became a major point of interest when Brazil was chosen to host the Olympic Games. Investigations found that the outage was not caused by hackers by more by an infrastructure that was poorly managed. The loss of power during the outage was 28,000 MW which is 45% of the total energy consumption of Brazil at the moment of the blackout.
Since the power outage was so short it called for few emergencies and was largely disregarded in the media. The biggest issue at the time of the blackout was the subway and the roadways which were now completely in the dark and at a standstill. It only became a major concern when it came time to consider the power needs of the Olympics and whether or not Brazil would be able to meet those needs. The investigation also was performed to make sure the infrastructure was secure and that major power outages were not being caused by hackers. Despite the investigation, some media sources continued to report that smaller-scale blackouts were the cause of hackers in the system.