Qualla: 2006 European Blackout

2006 European Blackout: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was 50HzMessung at German Wikipedia., Public domain. At 22:10 on Saturday, 4 November 2006, an engineer at E.ON Netz threw a switch in a control room in northwest Germany. The second circuit of a 380-kilovolt power line crossing the river Ems went dead. The line had to come down to let a cruise ship pass underneath - the Norwegian Pearl, a 294-meter hull just finished at the Meyer Werft shipyard in Papenburg, riding the river toward the North Sea with masts and funnels too tall to fit under live cables. Twenty-eight seconds later, lights began going out across half a continent. By the time the cascade stopped, more than 15 million households from Portugal to Poland had lost power. People were trapped in elevators in Paris. Trains halted in Madrid. The whole European grid had been brought to its knees by a maneuver done thousands of times before, by a switch nobody believed was dangerous.

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Image: The original uploader was 50HzMessung at German Wikipedia. | Public domain

2006 European Blackout: Why a Power Line Came Down for a Ship

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Corradox, CC BY-SA 3.0. Meyer Werft, founded in 1795, builds some of the largest cruise ships in the world in covered halls in Papenburg. The yard sits roughly thirty-six kilometers upstream from the open sea. To get a finished ship to salt water, the hull has to be towed down the river Ems, stern-first...

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