List of major power outages
This is a list of notable wide-scale power outages. To be included, the power outage must conform to of the following criteria: For example: Longest. This method is a formula that multiplies the number of hours by the population affected and doesn't reflect the nominal time in hours that the outages lasted. 1960–1969. 1965. On the evening of November 9, the Northeast blackout of 1965 affected portions of seven northeastern states in the United States and the province of Ontario in Canada. 1969. On August 5, a 50-mile (80 km) stretch of  Florida's Gold Coast was hit with a general power failure after an explosion at the Cutler Ridge facility. The outage affected more than 2 million people, and created a vast traffic jam. Miami and Ft. Lauderdale downtown areas were offline for almost two hours, with other areas dark for much longer periods. 1970–1979. 1971. On the evening of February 2, power in parts of the New York City boroughs of Manhattan, The Bronx and Queens was lost following an explosion at Con Ed's Waterside power facility on 40th Street and 1st Avenue in Manhattan. New York City television  and FM radio stations that transmit from the Empire State Building were off the air. AM radio stations were largely unaffected, as most of their transmitters were located in either Northern New Jersey (e.g. WABC-AM) or on High Island (e.g. WCBS-AM) in the Bronx, which was not affected by the blackout. However, several Manhattan AM station studios were affected due to insufficient power backups. Several lines of the New York City IND and IRT subway lines were affected, stranding passengers. At Grand Central Terminal power in the terminal was lost, but power on the tracks was retained because  it runs on direct current. The "New York Daily News" was also affected when the blackout caused their printing facility to halt operations. 1976. On July 4, a major power failure affected most of Utah and parts of Wyoming for 1.5 to 6 hours. 1977. On May 10, a nationwide blackout that lasted 5 hours affected Romania, causing US$1 billion losses, larger than the earthquake that had hit the country on March 4. The subsequent investigations showed it had been caused by a human error. On May 17, parts of South Florida were blacked out after a malfunctioning relay  caused the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Miami to go offline. On July 13–14 in New York City, 9 million people were affected by a power outage. It was a result of a transmission failure due to a lightning strike on power lines. A second lightning strike caused the loss of two more overhead power lines, and the last power connection between New York City and the Northwest. The power outage resulted in high instances of looting occurring over 26 hours. On September 20, a power outage covered almost the entire province of Quebec, affecting two million people, after  a failure at the Montagnais Substation along a series of 735kV transmission lines connecting to the Churchill Falls Generating Station in Labrador. Power was restored to scattered rural areas within an hour and service was brought back to parts of Montreal and Quebec City within two hours; it took several hours to fully restore power. 1980–1989. 1981. On January 8, prisoners on a work assignment burning trash and debris at the Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah, accidentally caused a major power failure when something they were burning exploded, causing a fireball that shorted out transmission lines above them. 1.5  million people lost power, in almost all of Utah, as well as parts of southeastern Idaho and southwestern Wyoming. 1982. On December 22, a transmission tower near Tracy, California collapsed onto an adjacent tower bringing down two 500-kV lines and a pair of 230-kV lines that passed underneath the 500-kV right of way. Total loss of 12,530 MW affected approximately five million people on the west coast. 1983. On December 27, two-thirds of the Swedish network was shut down when a single component in a switching station failed, causing a short circuit in a transformer. This  affected about 4.5 million people in the more densely populated southern half of Sweden. 1985. On May 17, most of South Florida was blacked out after a brush fire in the Everglades damaged overhead transmission lines. Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and the Florida Keys lost power for about 3.5 hours. About 4.5 million people were affected. 1987. On October 16, the Great Storm of 1987 interrupted the High-Voltage Cross-Channel Link between the United Kingdom and France. The storm caused a domino effect of power outages throughout the Southeast of England. 1989. On March 13, the March  1989 geomagnetic storm caused the Hydro-Québec power failure which left seven million people in the Canadian province of Quebec without power for over nine hours. On October 17, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake knocked out power to about 1.4 million customers in Northern California, mainly due to damaged electrical substations. 1990–1999. 1991. On July 7, a powerful wind storm affected a large portion of central North America and caused power outages for about one million customers from Iowa to Ontario. 1992. On August 24, Hurricane Andrew made landfall on Elliott Key. As it passed over the northern Florida Keys  it downed 17 miles (27 km) of power lines, breaking the wooden poles they were strung on, along a path that was in four feet (122 cm) of water, stretching from the Turkey Point Nuclear Plant southward to the upper Keys. The shallow depth prevented the use of large construction barge cranes for rebuilding the power pylons but the water was too deep for land-based construction vehicles. As a result, the Upper and Middle Keys were largely without power for several months as the Middle Keys Electric Co-op only had generating capacity for 10% of its demand. The  power lines heading north to Miami were restored much more quickly, as they were strung along the side of US Highway 1 on dry land. Key West power was in the process of decommissioning an end-of-life oil-fired plant and was able to restore 75% generating capacity for the lower keys in one day as there was no storm damage that far south. Key West power was in the process of converting to sourcing 100% of its electricity from the Turkey Point facility. 1995. On October 4, Hurricane Opal, which killed at least 59 people, knocked out power  to over two million customers across eastern and southern North America. 1996. On July 2–3 in the United States, Canada and Mexico there were two million people that lost power due to a transmission line overheating (the temperature was around 38°C/100°F) in Idaho and a 230-kV line between Montana and Idaho tripping. Some customers were without power for minutes, while others were without for hours. On August 10, the Western Intertie buckled under the high summer heat of the 1996 Western North America blackouts, causing a cascading power failure affecting nine western states of the  United States and parts of Mexico. Four million people were affected. Power was out in some locations for four days. On November 19, a severe ice storm affected the region around Spokane, Washington and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho causing power outages lasting up to two weeks. 1998. The early-January North American Ice Storm of 1998 caused prolonged blackouts in northeastern North America, particularly in Quebec, where many transmission towers were destroyed by ice. Over 3.5 million customers in total lost power during the event. From February 19 to March 27, the 1998 Auckland power crisis resulted in the entire Auckland  Central Business District in Auckland, New Zealand being without power for several weeks, after a line failure caused a chain reaction leading to the failure of three other lines. On May 31, a powerful wind storm caused a power outage for nearly two million customers across much of central North America. On September 7, a series of widespread derechos in the Northeast (the Labor Day Derechos) caused a power outage for hundreds of thousands of customers for several days. On December 8, affecting San Francisco, California, and its environs, over 350,000 customers (buildings) or 940,000 people were affected by an  outage caused when the Pacific Gas and Electric Company placed a San Mateo sub-station online at 8:17 am PST, while the station was still grounded following maintenance. This drew so much power from the transmission lines on the San Francisco peninsula that 25 other sub-stations in San Francisco automatically and immediately shut down. Power was not fully restored until almost 4:00 pm PST the same day. Economic costs were estimated in tens of millions of dollars. 1999. The 1999 Southern Brazil blackout was a widespread power outage (the largest ever at the time) that occurred in Brazil on  March 11 to June 22, 1999. The blackout involved São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and Rio Grande do Sul, affecting an estimated 75 to 97 million people and it lasted 103 days. 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 440 kV 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 440 kV system (a very important system to São Paulo state, carrying electricity generated by the Paraná river) a lot of 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 440 kV power plants, but the 750 kV AC lines and the 600 kV 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. In Rio, the military police placed 1,200 men in the streets to avoid looting. 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, June 22 fully  power restored. On July 5, the Boundary Waters–Canadian derecho cut power to over 600,000 homes in Quebec with additional outages in New England and in the Upper Great Lakes region. On July 29, in Taiwan, the  326 transmission tower collapsed due to a landslide, which disconnected around 8.46 million electricity consumers. On December 26–28, 1999 Cyclone Lothar and Martin left 3.4 million customers in France without electricity, and forced EdF to acquire all the available portable power generators in Europe, with some even being brought in from Canada. These storms brought a fourth of France's high-tension transmission  lines down and 300 high-voltage transmission pylons were toppled. It was described as one of the greatest energy disruptions ever experienced by a modern developed country. 2000–2009. 2000. On May 9, a major power outage left the entire southern half of Portugal, including Lisbon, without power for a few hours. The blackout occurred shortly after 10 pm local time. The "apagão" (translated as "super outage"), suddenly plunged Lisbon in complete darkness. Stalled commuter trains and traffic light failures wreaked some havoc in the streets. Security was immediately reinforced in the city, but no rise in criminal activity was registered . Energias de Portugal, the main Portuguese electricity operator, later reported that the blackout was due to the electrocution of an unfortunate stork, which landed "on the wrong place at the wrong time". Because of this, the story was reported in the "oddly enough" sections of some European newspapers. During the 12-month California electricity crisis of 2000–01, there were regular power failures due to energy shortages. 2001. On January 2, a fault in the transmission system in the state of Uttar Pradesh led to cascading failure throughout northern India. On May 20 to August 28, a problem at a power  substation caused the blackout of 2001 in Iran. Outages were reported in Tehran and at least six provincial capitals that are among Iran's biggest cities – Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, Kermanshah, Qazvin, and Hamedan. Consequently, it is among the largest blackouts, affecting more than . 2002. On January 30, a major ice storm hit Kansas City, Missouri, knocking trees into power lines and blowing up transformers throughout the city. The outage affected more than 270,000 people. On March 12, a power failure affected 13 million people in South Sumatra and Lampung. On July 13, Baku and nearly the entirety of Azerbaijan experienced  a blackout due to unknown causes. On April 30, nearly all of JEA's 355,000 customers in Jacksonville, FL lost power. 2003. On July 22, a severe wind storm disrupted power to over 300,000 customers in the Memphis, Tennessee, metropolitan area. On August 14–28, the Northeast blackout of 2003, a wide-area power failure in the northeastern US and central Canada, affected over 55 million people, 14 days fully restored. On September 2, the 2003 southern Malaysia blackout resulted when a power failure affected five states (out of 13) in Malaysia, including the capital Kuala Lumpur, for five hours, starting  at 10:00 am local time. On September 23, a power failure affected five million people in east Denmark and southern Sweden. On September 28, the 2003 Italy blackout resulted from a power failure that affected all of Italy except Sardinia, cutting service to more than 56 million people. 2004. On July 12, two power plants in Lavrio and Megalopolis, Greece, shut down due to malfunction within 12 hours of each other, during a period of high demand due to a heat wave. That led to a cascading failure causing the collapse of the entire Southern (Power) System, affecting several million  people in southern Greece. 2005. The 2005 Malaysia electricity blackout crisis caused electricity to fail in many states of Malaysia's northern peninsula, including Perak, Penang, Kedah, and Perlis. This was due to a fault of the main cable transmission line grid near Serendah, Selangor. In January, a cyber attack disrupted power service in three cities north of Rio de Janeiro, affecting tens of thousands of people. On May 25–August 3, the 2005 Moscow power blackouts ten-week-long power outage affected more than two million people in central Russia. The blackout was due to a cascading failure of  the power grid started by a transformer failure. Some lines of Moscow Metro lost power, stranding people in trains, 10 weeks fully power restored. Starting on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused widespread power outages throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee. Exact totals are difficult to define, especially in Louisiana parishes which became unoccupied for months. Power was also disrupted to 1.3 million customers when Katrina passed over Florida several days earlier. In total 2.6 million people across the US were left without power as a result of the storm. 2006. On August 1, in the Laurentians, in  the province of Québec, Canada, a large number (146,000, at its peak in the evening of August 1) of households were left without electricity for a whole day, and some for up to a week, due to intense thunderstorms that rolled through southern Quebec, including the greater Montreal area. Over 450,000 customers in total were affected.<ref>