Substation explosion causes blackout across central Maranhão, Brazil

Aug 2025Published 4 Nov 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor

SignificantOtherProvisionalNext update 5 Nov

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What happened

An explosion at an energy substation in the municipality of Peritoró, Maranhão, on the night of Wednesday 6 August 2025 caused a blackout in more than ten cities in the central region of the state. Municipalities named in the report include Bacabal, Codó, Coroatá, Dom Pedro and Pedreiras. Homes, businesses and essential services lost power. The substation is operated by Eletronorte, which said it had mobilised technical teams to investigate the failure and restore supply.

Equatorial Energia said it was in direct contact with Eletronorte and was monitoring the situation. Power was restored gradually for technical reasons, starting at 00:02 on Thursday 7 August in some municipalities and completed at 02:50 that day. The causes are to be investigated and reported to the National Electric System Operator (ONS).

Contributing factors

The source does not state the cause of the explosion. The report describes a single event, and the investigation had not concluded when the article was published.

Lessons learned

A substation explosion can cut supply across a wide area, so operators should map load transfer paths and check that backup routes can carry the affected load.
Restoring supply in stages, as was done here for technical reasons, should be planned and rehearsed in advance to avoid overloading the network during recovery.
Operators and distributors should issue timely, consistent public updates and share findings with the national system operator so that causes are documented and lessons reach the wider sector.

More lessons on outages, backup supply and restoration, emergency response and public communication, from every incident on the register.

Source

canalsolar.com.br

Published 2026-11-04. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.

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Chart to reuse with this story: Grid infrastructure incidents in Brazil, by year, free with a credit (PNG).

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