Dam problem blacks out Brazil’s two largest cities

SAO PAULO, (Reuters)-

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 Itaipu dam.

The Brazilian director of the Itaipu dam on the border of Brazil and Paraguay — the world's largest operational electricity generator — told a radio station that the power output of the entire dam was down.

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, a power cut blacked out the whole country for up to 15 minutes but electricity has been restored, an Asuncion resident said.

Traffic on the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil's financial capital, was in chaos in the dark and thousands of passengers were forced to exit stalled subway trains and walk along the tracks to get back to stations and climb to the surface.

Light was returning to some Sao Paulo neighborhoods close to downtown after a two-hour blackout.

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.

CBN Radio reported that Rio's state governor had ordered extra police onto the streets.

The website of Globo TV said other major cities, including Belo Horizonte and the capital Brasilia, were also affected by the power cut.

The electricity operator in the state of Minas Gerais said the massive outage was caused by a problem at the Itaipu dam.

The national electricity grid operator said 17,000 megawatts of energy had been lost, equivalent to the entire consumption of Sao Paulo state.