Crazy story we missed... Norwegian Pearl caused pan-European power outage

We don't generally dredge up old news, but this story seemed hard to believe until we verified it. The brand-new Norwegian Pearl cut power to millions of Europeans in November last year. How, you might ask? So did we!

The outage started with the planned shutoff of a 380,000 volt power line over the River Ems so that the newly-built Norwegian Cruise Line vessel could pass safely underneath on her way from the German shipyard to the North Sea. This seems to have caused a cascading power grid failure like falling dominoes.

After all the dominoes were counted, a large part of Western Europe, including parts of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, were without electrical power.

Included in the blackout were 5 million French residents Paris, Lyon and elsewhere. In addition, over 100 electric trains in Germany and Belgium were brought to a halt.