Brazil's Silva Defends Power Grid After Blackout

Cars drive through Paulista Av. in Sao Paulo during a blackout Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009. Brazil's...

Cars drive through Paulista Av. in Sao Paulo during a blackout Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009. Brazil's Minister of Mines and Energy Edison Lobao said a massive power failure that threw Brazil's two largest cities along with other parts of the country into darkness Tuesday night affecting millions of people, after the huge Itaipu hydroelectric dam suddenly went offline. Power was restored in some areas of the city, more than two hours after it went out. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

(AP)

Brazil's president fended off criticism of his nation's shaky power grid Wednesday as officials investigated a blackout that plunged as many as 60 million people into darkness, prompting concerns about the country's preparedness to host the 2016 Olympic Games.

Power went out for more than two hours in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and several other major cities after transmission problems knocked one of the world's biggest hydroelectric dams offline. Airport operations were hindered and subways ground to a halt.

A group of muggers took advantage of the darkness to rob people en masse near Rio's Maracana stadium, which will host the Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies. But overall, police said, crime did not rise in Rio and fell in Sao Paulo during the outage.

All of neighboring Paraguay also went dark, but for less than a half hour. A spokesman at Brazil's Energy Ministry said up to 60 million people — nearly a third of the nation's population — were affected by the blackout. He spoke on condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

The failure affected more people than the worst U.S. blackout on record: an Aug. 14, 2003 outage caused by power line problems in the Midwest that cut electricity to 50 million people in eight states and Canada.

The Energy Ministry called an emergency meeting for Wednesday afternoon, but Justice Minister Tarso Genro minimized the impact, saying Brazil has vastly improved its electrical grid since a series of outages in the 1990s.

"This is a micro-accident among the extraordinary conquests for energy production for Brazil over the last seven years," Genro said.

Energy analysts say Brazil has failed to invest enough in transmission lines as demand for power skyrockets amid an extended boom for Latin America's largest economy.

But President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva defended his government from criticism that it has not done enough to improve the power grid since he took office in 2003, two years after Brazil suffered shortages and rationing under his predecessor.