The grid should never go down for that length of time."The problems began at around 6.20pm, when a blackout descended upon a vast swath of the capital and Kent. Enormous queues formed at taxi ranks and there was fierce jostling as people struggled for places on the available buses.National Grid's American business, Niagara Mohawk, was among those hit hardest when one of the largest power failures in North American history plunged a string of states into chaos earlier this month.Last night, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, called for an inquiry into the power failure, which he branded as a "disgrace". Investment levels are at the highest level the industry has seen," he said In scenes reminiscent of the North American blackouts earlier this month, more than 250,000 people were affected by the National Grid supply failure, which lasted only 34 minutes but caused disruption late into the night. Crowds of confused passengers were cleared from mainline and Underground stations in central London.
Stranded commuters poured out of stations into a darkened city where the street lighting had failed Heavy rain added to the problems. "It happened because we had to coincident faults in quick succession," he said, adding: "This has got nothing to do with under-investment. "We had an equipment failure on our system in south-east London and that was followed within seconds by a second fault which caused the power cut." Mr Fairburn said this was "an extremely rare event", which had not occurred since the great storms of 1987. Mark Fairburn, chief operating officer of the National Grid, said: "We would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused to people," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
Energy minister Stephen Timms said he would be asking for an urgent report from the National Grid, which said it was investigating the cause of the fault. The same reason was given for the closure of Chalk Farm station.National Grid attributed the problem to an "unusual" power failure on a high-voltage circuit supplying Wimbledon, Hurst and New Cross. A London Underground spokesman said the Tube was largely running as normal, apart from delays on the Piccadilly Line due to the late finish of engineering works./p Southbound Northern Line trains were not stopping at Charing Cross station due to defective safety equipment. Transport services in London and the south-east returned to normal this morning after London was brought to a standstill by power cuts that stranded 250,000 in the rush hour last night.
