World gripped by power blackout

Some 30 million people have been affected

With millions of North Americans still reeling from the biggest electricity blackout in history, the accident is making headlines in the world media.

Reaction in countries around the globe ranges from gloating to sympathy and concern for the state of their own energy systems.

In France and Spain, the blackout became the top story on television, with correspondents describing "an eerie calm in the streets of Manhattan".

The Chinese Foreign Ministry deemed the news grim enough to express official sympathy with the people of the US and Canada, along with hopes of an "early recovery", the Chinese news agency Xinhua said.

In Russia, energy chief Anatoliy Chubays said that "the biggest accident in the history of world energy systems" could never have happened in his own country.

He could be excused a hint of smugness - Russia's united energy grid makes it possible to re-route electricity to regions whose power supplies have failed.

Mr Chubays ruled out terrorism as the possible cause of the blackout, but ordered security to be stepped up at key Russian power plants, just in case.

No guarantees

In Sweden, the spokesman for the national grid could offer no guarantees. The Swedish grid is closely linked to neighbouring Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany and even Poland.

Although a blackout on the US scale was unlikely, a collapse of the Norwegian network, for instance, could well spill over into Sweden, the spokesman said.

Now I am sure it will take them years to fix the electricity in Iraq. Baghdad power plant worker

In Taiwan, which suffered a nearly-total blackout in 1999 after a landslide destroyed an electricity transmission tower, the power company said the island's new electricity grid was still not immune to natural disasters.

Iranian radio homed in on America's "technical and technological vulnerability" and fears of a possible terrorist involvement.

The massive blackout has demonstrated that America's "excessive reliance on technology, both militarily and politically, is irrational and dangerous," the radio said.

For Azerbaijan, the North American blackout had immediate political implications. The country's ailing president Heydar Aliyev is undergoing treatment at a Cleveland hospital.

Agencies were quick to report that the clinic fell back on emergency generators, and the Azeri president's condition remains stable.

'Poetic justice'

In neighbouring Georgia, whose power grid has been crumbling for years, residents said they no longer paid attention to electricity failures, and certainly didn't regard them as any kind of catastrophe.

And in Iraq, which has suffered for months with little electricity, there is little sympathy for the self-confessed "superpower with a third-world grid". Some commentators saw poetic justice in Americans having to endure the same fate as the people of Baghdad and Basra.

But others said America's failure to keep its own house in order bode ill for its efforts to restore the Iraqi grid.

"They have the best equipment and technology and a power shortage can make such a big fuss in the United States," a power plant worker in Baghdad told Reuters.

"Now I am sure it will take them years to fix the electricity in Iraq."

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.