The 1999 Southern Brazil blackout was a widespread power outage (the largest ever at the time) that started in Brazil on March 11 and lasted until June 22, 1999. The blackout involved São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Goiás,

Mato Grosso Mato Grosso ( – lit. "Thick Bush") is one of the states of Brazil, the third largest by area, located in the Central-West region. The state has 1.66% of the Brazilian population and is responsible for 1.9% of the Brazilian GDP. Neighboring ...

Mato Grosso do Sul Mato Grosso do Sul () is one of the Midwestern states of Brazil. Neighboring Brazilian states are (from north clockwise) Mato Grosso, Goiás, Minas Gerais, São Paulo and Paraná. It also borders the countries of Paraguay, to the southwest, and ...

and

Rio Grande do Sul Rio Grande do Sul (, , ; "Great River of the South") is a Federative units of Brazil, state in the South Region, Brazil, southern region of Brazil. It is the Federative_units_of_Brazil#List, fifth-most-populous state and the List of Brazilian st ...

, affecting an estimated 75 to 97 million people. A chain reaction was started when a lightning strike occurred at 22h 16m at an electricity substation in Bauru, São Paulo State causing most of the 440kV circuits at the substation to trip. Brazil was undergoing a severe investment crisis during 1999, which limited spending on maintenance and expansion of the power grid. With few routes for the power to flow from the generating stations via the 440kV system (a very important system to São Paulo state, carrying electricity generated by the

Paraná river The Paraná River ( es, Río Paraná, links=no , pt, Rio Paraná, gn, Ysyry Parana) is a river in south-central South America, running through Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina for some ."Parana River". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Br ...

) many generators automatically shut down because they did not have any load. The world's biggest power plant at the time, Itaipu, tried to support the load that was no longer being supplied by the 440kV power plants, but the 750kV AC lines and the 600kV DC lines that connected the plant to the rest of the system could not take the load and tripped too. South of São Paulo the consumers experienced an overfrequency, caused because they had more generation than load, mostly because Itaipu was now connected only to this sub-system, but that problem was automatically solved by all generators in the area, that reduced their loads. The rest of the system experienced a much bigger problem, an underfrequency, since the system had a lot of load and not enough generation capacity. Some generators tripped because of the overfrequency, which aggravated the problem, and after an automatic rejection of 35% of the sub-system load the underfrequency did not go away. This caused the system to break in many pieces, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro states were split with a few areas remaining online. Most of the Minas Gerais system remained online, and powered Brazil's capital, Brasília, as well as the state of Goias and some of

Espirito Santo ''Espirito'' (Brazilian for "Spirit") is the second album by Lawson Rollins. Rollins composed all of the music and co-produced the album with Persian-American musician and producer Shahin Shahida (of Shahin & Sepehr) and multi-platinum producer Do ...

. In Rio, the military police placed 1,200 men in the streets to avoid

looting Looting is the act of stealing, or the taking of goods by force, typically in the midst of a military, political, or other social crisis, such as war, natural disasters (where law and civil enforcement are temporarily ineffective), or rioting. ...

. In São Paulo, traffic authorities announced they closed the city's tunnels to prevent robberies. More than 60,000 people were on Rio's subway when lights went out. At midnight, power began returning to some areas.

References

{{Reflist Brazil, 1999 Disasters in Brazil Southern Brazil blackout March 1999 events in South America

See also

References