ROME, Sept 28: A nationwide power blackout struck Italy in the dead of night on Sunday, unleashing chaos, stalling lifts, stranding travellers, but causing no known disasters.

Practically all the country’s 57 million people were hit, a failure similar in scale to last month’s collapse in the US Northeast and Canada — though, coming on a weekend night, its initial impact was less dramatic and less economically damaging.

“It’s chaos, and until the electricity comes back on it will continue to be chaos,” said policeman Fabio Bragazzi, 21, at Rome’s main Termini train station where passengers, among some 30,000 stranded across the country, slept on the ground.

Disbelief was heightened by uncanny coincidence — it was the fourth major Western blackout in two months, after cuts in North America, parts of London, and Scandinavia.

Workers struggled to restore electricity and by early afternoon had done so in two thirds of Italy’s 103 provinces, but parts of the capital and the south were still blacked out.

Authorities blamed the outage on a breakdown of electricity lines, some in heavy storms, from France, Switzerland and Austria — neighbours on whom Italy relies heavily for power.

Rome’s underground railway had to be evacuated and the outage scuppered a special “open night” in the city where shops, tourist sites and museums were to stay open until daybreak.

Hundreds were blocked in elevators across the country. But with most people asleep and emergency generators kicking in for hospitals and key services, there were no reports of fatalities.

Authorities said precautionary power cuts could hit about five per cent of households on Monday.

Italy’s worst blackout for nearly a decade, which struck at 3:20 a.m. hit all Italy except the island of Sardinia and some small pockets of the mainland, officials said.

Officials first blamed it on the breakdown of two big lines from France, which provides critical supplies and up to a fifth of Italy’s needs at night, during severe storms.

But they later said lines from Switzerland and Austria also failed, apparently helping to trigger the blackout, which also hit an adjacent Swiss region.

“It was an exceptional, extraordinary event,” Andrea Bollino, chairman of Italy’s grid operator GRTN, told Reuters.

France’s grid operator RTE said the blackout started with four successive line failures between Switzerland and Italy.

Power was expected to be up in all of Italy before Monday, Industry Minister Antonio Marzano said.

State-controlled airline Alitalia said airports continued working, with only four domestic flights cancelled.

Without traffic lights, many Romans drove uncharacteristically slowly. Cash machines were down.

Patrons in one Rome cafe without power to run the coffee machine turned to liqueur instead.

“We’re not happy at all. Everything was fine until about 3:30 a.m. Then it all happened at once and now we’re angry,” one party-goer in Rome said.

About 110 trains were stranded when the power went out. Almost all of the trains were later brought into stations.

Some patients were transferred from private clinics to public hospitals without incident, civil defence officials said.

Mobile phone services in many parts of the country were down, while some newspapers could not publish.

Civil Defence sent text messages to mobile phones alerting users to the blackout and telling them not to panic.—Reuters