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6
Nov '06

Norwegian Pearl Blacks Out Much of Europe

Posted by Michael in Norwegian Cruise Line

Norwegian Pearl. Photo from BBCSaturday night a large portion of Europe was plunged into darkness when a blackout that started in Cologne, Germany quickly spread to Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Croatia, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and even effected countries as far away as Morocco according to the BBC.

The root cause of the blackout…. NCL’s newest ship Norwegian Pearl.

So how does a 92000 ton ship cause a 2 hour blackout that affected a large portion of an entire continent?

Well, it wasn’t completely the ship’s fault, the German utility company E.ON temporarily shut down a high voltage power line that crosses over the River Ems so that the Norwegian Pearl could pass under it safely while it transited the river from Papenburg, Germany to Eemshaven, Netherlands.

The shutdown caused an overload through E.ON’s power grid shutting the entire grid down.  Since most of Europe’s power grid is interconnected, the overload and shutdown of E.ON’s grid caused a cascading failure across much of the continent.

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