Electric failure

Large stretches of western Europe were left without power on Saturday, after the German powercompany E.ON switched off an electricity transmission line across the river Ems. A cruiseship had been launched from a yard and was heading out to sea.

Unfortunately, this meant that the rest of the grid could not cope and started to overload and shut down. Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Austria, Croatia, Italy, Spain and Morocco were all affected, with millions of people left without electricity.

Although the outages did not last for much longer than an hour, the blamegame followed quickly and led to the conclusion that the power companies should invest more in infra structure.