Family meals by candlelight, elevators blocked between two floors, traffic lights stopped… Wednesday evening, the Côte d’Azur’s electricity network suffered a breakdown. And a hell of a breakdown. From Menton to Hyères, via Nice, Cannes and Fréjus, in the departments of Alpes-Maritimes and Var up to 260,000 homes were deprived of power, some for more than two hours.
RTE, the network manager in France, explains that it had to orchestrate these cuts, located in certain neighborhoods, following an “incident”. This Thursday, investigations are still underway but we know a little more about what caused the fuss!
“Overloads” of unknown origin
The origin of the problem has in any case been located. It was at around 7:50 p.m., in a “strategic” electrical substation, located in the town of Néoules (Var), north of Toulon, that “an incident, caused by overloads, forced us to temporarily relieve the network,” explains an RTE spokesperson. The installation being placed on “a structuring line at 400,000 volts”, the agents themselves had to trigger load shedding in neighborhoods plunged into darkness to “preserve the system in its entirety”, specifies the same source. Power is rerouted through other routes at 225,000 volts. The localized cuts and the mesh of the network therefore avoided a blackout much more generalized, assures the manager.
But what is the origin of these “overloads”? “Investigations, launched from the start of the incident, are still underway to determine it,” says RTE. What is certain is that it is indeed an “exceptional technical failure”. “There was no external intervention, nor any intentional or malicious nature in what happened Wednesday evening,” said the spokesperson. In any case, repairs are certainly to be expected on parts or computer equipment which could have been damaged during this incident. But no further cuts are to be feared immediately, assures RTE.
Elevators blocked but no major consequences
When the blackout struck, certain roads were deprived of public lighting and traffic lights, but no major accident was reported. Firefighters mainly intervened to rescue people stuck in elevators. In the Alpes-Maritimes, the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (Sdis) indicates that it has received around a hundred calls to this effect. In the end, rescuers had to intervene in just under 20 residences.
The cuts also disrupted the holding of certain sporting events. In Cannes, the women’s volleyball players were meeting the Vandoeuvre Nancy club at the Palais des Victoires, to the west of the city, when the lights were cut off. On the Nice side, a judo match between the local team and that of Montpellier had to be stopped.