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Kaliningrad recovers from blackout

Commission to investigate causes created

Photo ITAR-TASS/ Stanislav Krasilnikov

Photo ITAR-TASS/ Stanislav Krasilnikov

KALININGRAD, August 9 (Itar-Tass) - Response teams of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry’s (EMERCOM) headquarters for the Kaliningrad Region as well as fire fighting garrisons checked socially important, potentially dangerous facilities, economic entities and transport infrastructure after a major power outage. “All facilities (as of 03:30 MSK) operate normally,” EMERCOM reported.

At the only two transformer substations in the Chkalovsky district of Kaliningrad remained disconnected.

Russian Energy Ministry will conduct a probe into the cause of the power supply disruption in the Kaliningrad Region. “This morning, the ministry will hold an emergency meetings on the problems of a large-scale blackout in Kaliningrad,” Energy Ministry’s spokeswoman Olga Golant told Itar-Tass.

According to an Itar-Tass source in Yantarenergo (part of Russian Grids), “power engineers believe that a thunderstorm was one of the main causes of power outages; however, a commission working at the emergency site will find out exact circumstances.”

According to this source, “A comprehensive inspection, which will be conducted in part by experts of the Russian Federal Service for Ecological, Technical and Atomic Supervision (RosTekhNadzor - RTN), which will establish the exact causes of the massive outage will be conducted today.”

The Russian Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Supervision (Rostechnadzor) said it would investigate the causes of mass blackouts in Kaliningrad.

“We’ll create a commission to reveal the causes of mass blackouts. The commission will start working today. Under Russia’s legislation, it will take 20 days to spot the causes of mass blackouts,” spokesperson to Rostechnadzor Yulia Neposedova said on Friday.

Earlier, Yantarenergo told Itar-Tass correspondent in Kaliningrad Vladimir Nuyakshev that “a preliminary cause of the emergency power outage in the Kaliningrad Region, which occurred on Thursday night, leaving 645 thousand people without power, was a direct lightning strike that hit a high-voltage power line in area of the town of Sovetsk.”

Earlier, EMERCOM reported that at 23:31 MSK Thursday, “the emergency repair efforts in the Kaliningrad Region have been completed, and electricity supply has been restored according to standard procedure.”

The region’s governor Nikolai Tsukanov told Itar-Tass earlier that “all social institutions were quickly connected to backup power sources, which allowed us to rule out undesirable consequences.”

The Energy Ministry reported that about 645,000 Kaliningrad residents had remained without electricity on August 8. Electricity went out due to the shutdown of the Kaliningrad thermal power plant. “The lighting strike was one of the key reasons. This made the power lines protection system to work,” Yantarenergo specialists said.

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