© Altaf Qadri/The Associated Press
Stranded commuters wait for their trains to arrive at a train station in New Delhi, India, Monday, July 30, 2012. Northern India was plunged into darkness Monday after a supply grid tripped because of overloading, officials said.
Northern India's power grid crashed Monday, halting hundreds of trains, forcing hospitals and airports to use backup generators and leaving 370 million people - more than the population of the United States and Canada combined - sweltering in the summer heat.
The blackout, one of the worst to hit India in a decade, highlighted the nation's inability to feed a growing hunger for energy as it strives to become a regional economic power.
The country's northern grid crashed about 2:30 a.m. because it could no longer keep up with the huge demand for power in the hot summer, officials in the state of Uttar Pradesh said. However, Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said he was not sure exactly what caused the collapse and had formed a committee to investigate it.
The grid feeds the nation's breadbasket in Punjab, the war-wracked region of Kashmir, the burgeoning capital of New Delhi, the Dalai Lama's Himalayan headquarters in Dharmsala and the world's most populous state, the poverty stricken Uttar Pradesh.
By late morning, 60 percent of the power had been restored in the eight northern states affected by the outage and the rest was expected to be back on line by the afternoon, Shinde said. The grid was drawing power from the neighboring Eastern and Western grids as well as getting hydroelectric power from the neighboring mountain kingdom of Bhutan.
Comment: What a shame that Judge Heavey cannot extend the same level of support and scrutiny to those caged without charge or trial for over a decade in Guantanamo Bay. Who equally may under torture may have told "what the interrogator wants to hear" and who equally suffer at the hands of psychopaths that control the system.