RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s president fended off criticism of his nation’s shaky power grid Wednesday as officials investigated a blackout that plunged as many as 60 million people into darkness, prompting concerns about the country’s preparedness to host the 2016 Olympic Games.
Power went out for more than two hours in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and several other major cities after transmission problems knocked one of the world’s biggest hydroelectric dams offline.
Airport operations were hindered, and subways ground to a halt.
A group of muggers took advantage of the darkness to rob people en masse near Rio’s Maracana stadium, which will host the Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies. But overall, police said, crime did not rise in Rio and fell in São Paulo during the outage.
All of neighboring Paraguay also went dark, but for less than a half hour. A spokesman at Brazil’s Energy Ministry said up to 60 million people — nearly a third of the nation’s population — were affected by the blackout. He spoke on condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
The failure affected more people than the worst U.S. blackout on record: an Aug. 14, 2003, outage caused by power-line problems in the Midwest that cut electricity to 50 million people in eight states and Canada.
The Energy Ministry called an emergency meeting for Wednesday afternoon, but Justice Minister Tarso Genro minimized the impact, saying Brazil has vastly improved its electrical grid since a series of outages in the 1990s.
“This is a micro-accident,” Genro said.
