A cascade of crises as Turkey heads for elections

As one of our editors said around the front page desk yesterday, our news agenda on March 31 could have made headlines for at least a month in any Scandinavian newspaper.

The first big news came in the morning, when we had the agencies reporting on the cancellation of train and subway transportation in Istanbul due to a major power cut. Until then, we thought the power cut was one of those ordinary outages that had become ordinary for us over the days before, which could have paralyzed our work if we did not have our generator back-up system.

Soon after it became clear that the power cut was not limited to Istanbul, a country-sized metropolis of 15 million people. It was all over Turkey, apart from Van near the Iranian border, which had back-up electricity from the Iranian grid.

But what about the back-up from the European Union grid? It was gone. With all railroad signals down and traffic lights in cities and towns gone, traffic also stopped. Markets, hospitals and factories began to suffer the biggest power cut in the country since the earthquake in 1999 that killed more than 17,000 people.

Soon after the outage started, Energy Minister Taner Y?ld?z announced that the electricity grid had collapsed. After a few hours, as the majority of the country was still without power, Y?ld?z said some of Turkey?s power plants had stopped generating electricity and that might have had a domino effect on the others, breaking the entire grid. In the meantime, the Chamber of Electrical Engineers (EMO) speculated that because the owners of privatized local grids were unable to collect payments from clients, and because of the depreciation of the Turkish Lira, the companies, most of them close to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Parti)...