After the major August 2003 blackout in the northeastern and midwestern United States, spokesmen for the Russian energy monopoly Unified Energy Systems (UES) bragged to a Russian news agency that a similar breakdown was unlikely in their country. Yet on May 25, 2005, a major outage in Russia’s capital left millions of Muscovites without power. Public transportation ground to a halt; water was shut off in the middle of a heat wave; an explosion triggered at a chemical plant released nitric oxide into the air; and trading on both Moscow stock exchanges was suspended. The breakdown, which resulted in estimated … Continue reading Notes & Briefs