Major outage in Schaarbeek and Evere
Large parts of Schaarbeek and Evere (Brussels) were hit by an electricity outage yesterday. It took until early evening for power to be restored to all homes and businesses in the area. People who suffered an outage for six hours or more can apply for compensation from electricity network manager Sibelga.
It started around 12:30PM when problems were identified at a high voltage station near the Josaphat Park. The station supplies electricity to around thirty local stations and that explains the scale of the outage.
The electricity distributer faced several different technical issues all at the same time. The reserve powerline that is supposed to guarantee power if the main line fails also didn’t work properly and needed to be repaired too.
Traffic lights at Meiser failed and the Flemish and Francophone broadcasters VRT and RTBf were without main power too. At VRT emergency generators kicked in. They tried this at RTBF, but that failed and they even had to call in the fire service because of the smoke emanating from the emergency generators. Read More...
