By Bruno Marfinati
Sao Paulo - A major electricity outage left tens of millions of people in Brazil's two largest cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro without power on Tuesday night due to problems at the massive Itaipu dam that straddles its border with Paraguay.
The blackout affected at least six of Brazil's 26 states, hitting the industrialised southeastern part of the country especially hard. All of Paraguay, which gets most of its energy from the dam, was also briefly left in the dark.
Three hours after the blackout, power was beginning to be restored in some parts of Sao Paulo, Brazil's financial capital and South America's largest city. But most of the sprawling metropolis remained in the dark.
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"The exact cause still isn't known, but we suspect that atmospheric problems, an intense storm, may have contributed to or caused the transmission lines to Itaipu to shut down," Brazil's energy minister, Edison Lobao, told reporters in Brasilia, the capital.
Jorge Samek, the Brazilian director of Itaipu, the world's second-largest hydroelectric plant, told CBN Radio that the entire dam went down.
Officials said they hoped power would be fully restored in the coming hours.
The Itaipu power plant provides about 20 percent of the electricity supply in Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, but more than 90 percent of Paraguay's.
In Paraguay, the power cut blacked out the whole country for up to 15 minutes but electricity was soon restored, an Asuncion resident said.
Traffic on the streets of Sao Paulo descended into chaos shortly after the power outage. Thousands of passengers were forced to exit stalled subway trains and walk along the tracks to get back to stations and make their way to the surface.
Rio de Janeiro, a tourist hub famous for its beaches and Carnival, is due to host the World Cup soccer championship in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016.
At Rio's international airport, flights continued to take off and land but many passengers faced delays because taxi drivers were afraid of driving in the dark in crime-ridden areas.
No flight delays or cancellations were reported at Sao Paulo's international airport, which was operating on emergency generators.
CBN Radio reported that Rio's state governor, Sergio Cabral, had ordered extra police onto the streets to try to keep them safe in the dark.
Other Brazilian cities that suffered power outages included Belo Horizonte in the state of Minas Gerais and Campinas, a large city about an hour outside of Sao Paulo.
Brazil's national electricity grid operator said 17 000 megawatts of energy had been lost, equivalent to the entire consumption of Sao Paulo state. - Reuters
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