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Blackout spooks world
15/08/2003 09:59 - (SA)
Tokyo - From London to Tokyo, a perplexed world looked on Friday as massive power outages in the United States and Canada stranded international travellers and grabbed global headlines with scenes of pitch-black cities, silenced subways, and stymied airports.
In Tokyo, Beijing and Hong Kong, footage of cities lost in the dark, thousands of people streaming into New York streets in 32° heat, or others stuck in underground subways led local television news and had many scratching their heads.
"How could such a thing happen, I mean, everything was shut down?" said Setsuko Kato, a 55-year-old Japanese housewife. "It would be a disaster if that happens here."
Japan's biggest national newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, chimed in with the headline: "America's heart surprisingly fragile," accompanied by page one colour photo of a red setting sun dipping behind a blacked-out Manhattan silhouette.
In London too, news of the blackout played almost continuously on Britain's 24-hours news stations, Sky and the BBC. Cameras trained on New York City's crowded streets played back live images of droves of city workers walking home.
The reaction was slightly different in the Philippines, where the capital city Manila regularly goes dark from power outages - some lasting for days. Popular radio commentator Joe Taruc wondered aloud in his morning talks show what all the fuss was about.
Flights cancelled
Mexico's largest airline cancelled its evening flight from Mexico City to John F Kennedy Airport and delayed a departure from New York, while British Airlines and Virgin Atlantic Airlines diverted New York-bound planes mid-flight to other destinations.
Because of the time difference in Britain, the last flights bound for North America from London's Heathrow Airport had departed before the blackout, a Heathrow spokesperson said.
However, some 1 700 British Airways passengers in North America were affected by the airline's cancellation of seven flights from New York's JFK airport to Britain and two from Toronto to Britain, airline spokesperson Iain Burns said.
Burns said some of BA's westbound flights from Britain to the United States, already in flight, were diverted to Philadelphia and Boston, and Toronto-bound planes went to Montreal.
Virgin Atlantic airlines said one of its New York-bound flights was returned to Heathrow and a second was diverted to Washington.
In Japan, the blackout struck a chord in Tokyo, where many feared the capital would see its own massive power outages this summer.
Earlier this year, authorities closed down 17 of the nuclear reactors that feed the city for safety checks, and many experts predicted the biggest blackouts in decades as the city cranked up the August air conditioning. And although most of the reactors are still not up and running, the threat of blackouts has been tempered by unseasonably cool and rainy weather.
Magnitude
"I remember similar blackouts decades ago in Japan and New York, but I was surprised to see it today in such a magnitude," said Seiji Oba, a spokesperson for the Japanese cabinet's crisis management department. "I wonder if there were any precautions in an event like that."
Terrorism was on the minds of some, an issue Japan's national Asahi Shimbun newspaper tried to address in its Web site banner: "Authorities deny terrorism."
Officials in New York and Washington said there were no signs of terrorism, but the precise cause of the outages remained unclear.
Canadian authorities speculated at first that it appeared lightning had struck a power plant on the U.S. side of the border in the Niagara Falls region, setting off outages that spread over 24 000km², but US officials quickly disputed that.
The blackouts started just before evening rush hour on Thursday, engulfing most of New York state and parts of New England, and spreading west to Ohio and Michigan. In Toronto, Canada's largest city, workers fled their buildings when the power went off. There also were widespread outages in Ottawa, the capital. -AP
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