In the February 2002 issue, IWP&DC published news on the reported failure of 13 out of 18 turbines at the Itaipu plant in southern Brazil.
Since this story was published, we received news that the cause of the perturbation was a short circuit in one of the lines of the 440kV system, in the state of Sao Paulo. This caused the disconnection of two lines of that system, resulting in the oscillation of the network that originated a sequence of disconnections, and finally, in the blackout of a wide portion of the country. According to the Itaipu Binacionalm, this cannot be characterised as a failure of the Itaipu generating units.