Introduction

On 14 August 2003, a blackout occurred in the Northeastern part of the US and in Lower Canada, causing, among other things, the normal flow of life to come to an abrupt standstill in New York City. Lots of people got stuck in elevators, the subway system halted and millions of New Yorkers came out into the streets, many of whom were forced to stay there for the night. Engineers managed to trace the origin of this blackout to Ohio: apparently, operators did not know how to deal with local disturbances and this caused several lines to get overloaded, which subsequently were switched off. The instability spread from one region to the next, resulting in the large-scale blackout (Schewe, 2007). Only a few weeks later, a major storm knocked down power lines near the Italian-Swiss border. Due to excessive loads on the remaining lines, officials decided to remove Italy from the European grid. Less than two minutes after this decision’s implementation, frequency instabilities caused a complete collapse of the Italian electricity system, virtually throwing Italy into darkness. In Rome, where the annual Notte Bianca festival was taking place, the power outage created chaos after the subway system stopped functioning, leaving thousands of festival visitors stranded. The death of at least four people was directly attributed to the power outage (Lagendijk, 2008).