IT IS incredible, but true. The whole of Italy was plunged into darkness last Saturday because somewhere in the Swiss Alps a tree fell over.
The troublesome tree took out a cable carrying electricity into Italy, which buys in almost a fifth of its power. The incident triggered a cascade of failures that left more than 50 million Italians languishing in the dark.
Earlier in September, 4 million Scandinavians suffered a similar fate when a transmission line between Sweden and Denmark was lost in stormy weather. And in August, 50 million people in the US and Canada endured days of…
