News

St.Petersburg in the dark

19:00 | 24 August 2010           Print version        

On Friday evening, St. Petersburg suffered a massive blackout. At about 6.30 p.m., the electricity went off in seven of the city’s 18 districts and some parts of the Leningrad Oblast. The metro ground to a halt, along with commuter trains and the trolleybus network. Automatic doors were blocked, and hundreds of elevators stopped with people inside them.

To make matters worse, the water was also turned off almost everywhere because the pumping facilities had no electricity. Huge traffic jams formed on the city’s darkening streets due to the disabled traffic lights. Crowds of people walked along the streets. Storage cell operators claimed that reserves would not last more than two to three hours.

Along with the lack of electricity, there was also a shortage of information. Radio stations and television were out of service, and the local news sites and wire services that stayed alive were overloaded. Bloggers reported what they were seeing — or rather, not seeing. Friends and relatives called journalists asking alarmed questions.

The power remained on at St. Isaac’s Square, where the offices of The St. Petersburg Times and the St. Petersburg bureau of Vedomosti are located. Calls to the Emergency Ministry went unanswered for some time, while power companies responded with uninformative excuses. City Hall was silent.

The first official news release came from Territory Generating Company (TGK-1), which stated that the problem with the energy supply was not TGK’s fault. At that time, most districts already had electricity again and the alarm was over. After 8 p.m., City Hall — whose office was also left without electricity — reported that the problem had happened at the Eastern power plant, which is owned by the Federal Network Company (Federalnaya Setevaya Kompaniya) and located in the Vsevolozhsky district of the Leningrad Oblast. The plant was built in 1964 and has been only partly renovated. The emergency may have been caused by the plant’s aging equipment, by a drop in temperature or by increased consumption of electricity during the incredible heat wave.

Once the emergency was over, more detailed information began to appear, though the causes of the incident are still unknown.

At about 10 p.m., the governor’s press service said that St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko was aware of the emergency and had tasked Deputy Governor Alexei Sergeyev with investigating the causes and taking urgent steps to neutralize its consequences. We also learned that 19 of the city’s hospitals had had their power cut off, but no patients had suffered thanks to reserve power facilities. And close to midnight, the Federal Network Company triumphantly reported that all of its energy facilities in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast were functioning normally.

The next day, state bank Sberbank reported that 300 of its 1,800 ATM machines in the city had been out of service for about an hour and a half. Sixty-eight commuter trains and six long-distance trains were delayed by up to three hours, according to a press release from the local railroad authority. The more time passes since the emergency, which thankfully did not result in any victims, the more details we learn about how everything was brought under control. The echo of an hour-long blackout will be heard for days, resounding ever louder.