Major power outage lasting hours, strikes much of the Balkans on Friday, while the southern European region was gripped by a heat wave that raised temperatures to over 40 degrees Celsius, the Associated Press reported, cited by BTA.
Montenegro authorities said an outage that lasted several hours in the country's power distribution system left almost the entire country without electricity, while similar problems were experienced in coastal Croatia, as well as in Bosnia and Albania.
Nada Pavičević, a spokeswoman for Montenegro's state electricity distribution company, described the outage as a "disruption of a regional scale" and said authorities are still working to determine what happened. The exact cause of the outage was not immediately clear, as the regional power grid has been overloaded for days due to overconsumption and the use of air conditioners at high temperatures.
Bosnia's state energy company said the outage there was caused by problems in a regional distribution network, while Albania's state energy company said "extreme heat" caused the problem.
Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Albania share the Adriatic coast, and the region's power grids remain interconnected decades after the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
"The entire electrical network of continental Europe is connected and this sometimes has its advantages, but it also has disadvantages,” said Danko Blažević, director of the Croatian electricity transmission company. "The advantage is that you can import, export and sell energy, but then the disadvantage is that when there is a failure, it is basically transmitted from one system to another,” he added.
In the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, the outage caused traffic jams, with trams halted and traffic lights not working. Similar traffic jams were reported in the Croatian port city of Split.
In the Croatian resort of Dubrovnik, thousands of tourists were left stranded mid-afternoon as restaurants, pubs, supermarkets, ice cream parlors and more closed their doors during the blackout. Football fans crowded around some of the pubs with blacked-out TV screens, unable to watch the European Football Championship matches in Germany.
The blackout, which began shortly after noon on Friday, came as authorities across the region warned citizens to be cautious, drink water and avoid the sun due to extremely high temperatures.
"Do not stay in the sun between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.”, warned the Public Health Institute of Serbia in its instructions to citizens. "If you must go out, please take a bottle of water with you," the instructions read.
Although hot summers are normal for the Balkans, temperatures usually do not reach such levels in mid-June. Earlier this week, the authorities in North Macedonia imposed emergency measures until Sunday, after which the heat is expected to subside.
On Friday, authorities in Romania imposed weight restrictions on vehicles traveling on national roads in some counties to prevent deterioration of road surfaces.