{"id":6740,"date":"2026-09-30T19:28:52","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T17:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.continuitaly.it\/?p=6740"},"modified":"2026-10-01T18:07:54","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T16:07:54","slug":"infrastructure-crises-cascading-failures-real-world-cases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.continuitaly.it\/en\/2026\/09\/30\/infrastructure-crises-cascading-failures-real-world-cases\/","title":{"rendered":"It really happened: a minor glitch turns into an infrastructure crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Three blackouts and a submerged infrastructure. The pattern is almost always the same: a local event affects an interconnected system, and what seemed redundant ceases to be so. <\/em><\/p>\n

Major infrastructure crises do not necessarily begin with a large-scale incident. Sometimes it all starts with a voltage fluctuation, a fire at a substation, vegetation growing too close to a power line, or a damaged cable on the seabed. The real problem arises later, when that local incident interacts with a highly interconnected system and the consequences begin to spread. <\/p>\n

April 28, 2025: Spain and Portugal in the dark<\/h2>\n

At 12:33 p.m. on April 28, 2025, the power grids of peninsular Spain and Portugal suffered a total collapse. A small part of southwestern France experienced brief outages, while the rest of the European grid remained largely stable. Restoration took approximately 12\u201316 hours. ENTSO-E reconstructed the incident with an international group of experts and, in its final report published on March 20, 2026, concluded that the blackout did not have a single cause but resulted from the interaction of multiple factors. Oscillations, problems with voltage and reactive power control, differing control strategies, rapid reductions in generation, and generator trips led to very rapid voltage increases and a cascade of outages. The lesson for those concerned with resilience is clear. In complex systems, it does not take a single component to \u201cfail and shut everything down.\u201d All it takes is a combination of conditions that, taken one by one, seem manageable, but together exceed the system\u2019s ability to stabilize itself. <\/p>\n

Heathrow: Three Power Sources, One Dependency<\/h2>\n

A few weeks earlier, on the evening of March 20, 2025, at 11:21 p.m., one of the three transformers at the North Hyde substation (275 kV, in west London) failed and caught fire. The other two went offline shortly afterward, and the substation lost all power. The fire was not inside the airport and did not affect any runways or terminals. Nevertheless, Heathrow suspended operations for most of March 21. This case is instructive for three reasons. <\/p>\n