8. April 14th, 2015 Turkey Blackout – 76 Million Affected
On April 14th 2015 two power plants, Izmir in Aegean province and Adana Cukurova in the Mediterranean province, failed which caused a 5 – 10% cut in the capacity of the system. Like many other blackouts, this caused a chain reaction which then shut down the entire system. The blackout affected nearly all of Turkey and left 76 million people without power for 10 hours. Cellphones lost connection, traffic was backed up, the metro lines were stopped and several factories that were without their own generators were forced to close down.
The power outage came at a tenuous time for Turkey as they were planning to link up with the European grid system, a future that could be destroyed if it was discovered that Turkey’s power lines were not secure. The government did confirm that they looked into whether or not the power failure was the result of a cyber-attack and ruled that they found no evidence to suggest such a thing occurred. However, a blackout occurring the day before Turkey is set to sign a long-term agreement with the continental European grid is a bit suspect of a cyber-attack. The power outage did not extend into EU countries that Turkey was linked to on the grid but those EU countries did send power back in order to help Turkey get out of the dark.
An investigation discovered that mismanagement of the grid and technical problems held the brunt of the blame for the power failures. This led to the head of the state-run energy grid company resigning from his position. It was determined that the exact time the outage occurred was due to maintenance men working on more than one transmission line at a time. This led to the creation of measures to counter a future nationwide blackout and to ensure that there would be no blackout to disrupt the elections that were to occur the following June.