MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Lula da Silva orders in-depth investigation into the massive blackout

Government satellites “killed” the strong winds and lightning storm original explanation of the outage

Brazilian president Lula da Silva revealed Friday he had ordered all government offices linked to the power industry, an in depth investigation into the Tuesday blackout which he described as a “national disaster”.

The outage left over 70 million people in 18 states of Brazil’s 26 in the dark for over four hours. Neighbouring Paraguay was also left in the dark.

“I’ve told all the offices and organizations that we need an in depth investigation into what really happened. We have the instruments to find out what occurred and why did it occur” said Lula da Silva.

“If our electric system and grid is solid, as we think it is, why then did we have such a disaster?”

“I want a very correct and exact investigation and once we have the final results, public opinion will be informed of what happened, which was the real cause for the blackout”, he added.

Lula da Silva said he was convinced the Brazilian power grid and generation plants make up a solid system, but that does not eliminate the possibilities of failures.

“Nothing in this world can be structured in such a way to supplant something caused by a natural disaster or even human error, which we still do not know”.

However is spite of the fact that so far no full investigation has been completed “I can guarantee the Brazilian population that Brazil will not be short of energy”.

“The Brazilian people won’t have any problem with lack of power because Brazil is producing more than the energy demanded”, he underlined.

With Friday’s remarks Lula da Silva backed off from earlier claims by his Energy minister that strong storms, wind and lighting caused a failure in transmission lines, especially after the government’s own satellite imagery showed that lightning strikes were neither close nor strong enough to cause such damage.

After the blackout darkened both Rio and Sao Paulo and other key cities Tuesday night, Brazilian Energy Minister Edison Lobao said it was bad weather that took out transmission lines running from Itaipu to two electric substations in Sao Paulo state. Three key transformers short-circuited, he said.

But the National Institute for Space Research said the nearest lightning strikes were ten kilometres from any transmission line. Others pointed out that the transformers are built to withstand the heavy rains common in Brazil.

In fighting also seems to have surfaced: Jorge Miguel Samek, the head of Itaipu Binational, the agency in charge of the dam which provided most of the collapsed power, said the problem had nothing to do with the hydroelectric project, but with a failure in the transmission lines. But, Furnas Centrais Eletricas, the electric company that oversees the lines, said it had detected no problems with the lines.

The blackouts came three days after the United States CBS's “60 Minutes” news program reported that two past Brazilian power outages were caused by hackers.

Lobao declined to directly answer a question about whether hackers were involved, and Lula da Silva knocked down questions about the blackout being the result of sabotage. “There is no reason for anyone to think that it was a bigger thing than it really was,” he said Friday.

The blackouts also raised questions about whether Brazil is sufficiently prepared to provide secure energy when it hosts the World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.