It was chaos. For six days, north-western Germany's otherwise idyllic Münsterland region was in a state of emergency. 50 pylons operated by energy conglomerate RWE had snapped like matchsticks under the weight of the year's first snowfall, depriving the region of power, light and heat.

Thousands of people camped out in sports halls and emergency shelters, eating hot soup provided by the army and the government's disaster relief organization. Farmers whose well pumps became inoperable when the power went out had to carry buckets of water to their cows and pigs. Factory assembly lines were shut down, and restaurants and supermarkets were forced to throw away thawing frozen meat. "Who is going to pay for all this?" asks Franz-Josef Melis, mayor of the city of Ochtrup.

Although power was restored to the region last Thursday, residents of some rural areas are still having to rely on emergency generators for their power supply. As the region's 250,000 residents recover from the ordeal, public resentment is mounting against Essen-based utility RWE which has offered only feeble explanations for the power outage. According to statements issued by RWE, the cut was not caused by problems in the power grid or organizational deficiencies. The weather, says the utility, was the problem.

Company spokesmen say that the unexpected early onset of winter caused heavy icing on power lines which as a result far exceeded their maximum permissible weight. RWE has rejected all claims for compensation, claiming that the blackout was caused by "force majeure." Of course, companies are powerless when it comes to Acts of God.

But the utility was singing an entirely different tune only two years ago, when there was a breakdown in large segments of Italy's power grid. During the ensuing chaos, RWE executives were quick to criticize the Italians, adding that such large-scale blackouts would be virtually inconceivable in Germany. After all, they said, Germany's utilities have consistently invested heavily in network technology and safety. This, they explained, is also the reason why energy is a little more expensive in Germany than in neighboring European countries. In light of the events in Münsterland, it was nothing but a feeble attempt to offer yet another excuse for Germany's skyrocketing electricity prices.

But this kind of rhetoric suddenly sounded less than plausible when an entire series of RWE pylons promptly snapped under the weight of the first major snowfall of the year. Meanwhile, Christa Thoben, Economy Minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, is insisting that the utility disclose how much it has been investing in the power grid. The Bundesnetzagentur, the federal agency that regulates the German utilities and telecommunications sectors, is also likely to be asking some tough questions about the incident.

Safety concerns

It appears that for years RWE neglected to inform the public about serious safety problems in its 12,000 kilometer (7,460-mile) network of power lines, problems that may well have put the health and lives of Germans throughout the country at risk. It's a potentially serious allegation, the kind of talk one would normally expect from environmental groups. Instead, it stems from internal RWE documents from 2003 that were obtained by SPIEGEL. According to the documents,

* about 60 percent of all high-voltage pylons in the region served by RWE have a serious defect in materials and may be at high risk for collapse;

* many pylons are not even capable of withstanding 40 percent of normal loads, falling far short of the load-bearing capacity required by law;

* Harry Roels, President and CEO of RWE, was made aware of these conditions in late 2003.

In their notes, RWE managers described a worst-case scenario -- what they considered the worst possible outcome of an accident involving the giant steel structures. The incidents in the Münsterland region seem like minor household accidents by comparison. According to the internal RWE documents, existing material defects could lead to "large-scale pylon collapse" under extreme weather conditions, and the cost of restoring the network alone would amount to "about €350 million". The managers also factored "the risks of criminal liability resulting from personal injury" into their analysis.

Translated into plain language, this means that collapsing pylons and falling high-voltage lines could injure or even kill people. In their analysis, the RWE engineers concluded that the probability of such a worst-case scenario is "up to 10 percent," while the risk of individual pylons collapsing under "normal weather conditions" is as high as 50 percent.

The ailing condition of RWE's power grid is apparently attributable to a simple defect that reaches back to the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany, when RWE's predecessor, Rheinisch-Westfälische Elektrizitätswerke, began building a large network of high-voltage lines to supply electricity to a young and growing West Germany. Throughout Germany, construction crews were building the giant pylons that would be used to bring electricity from large power plants in the central Ruhr and Rhineland regions to urban and rural customers.

Ageing steel

A type of steel known as Thomasstahl was used to build the towers until 1965. Although the material was considered state-of-the-art at the time, it has since become clear that using it to build pylons constituted an incalculable risk. That's because Thomasstahl has a relatively high nitrogen content, which has serious long-term consequences.

In memoranda sent to the RWE executive board in 2000 and 2001, RWE safety engineers warned that the pylons would become brittle over the decades. As a result, instead of yielding elastically in response to heavy loads, the brittle giants would simply collapse, and not just under extreme loads.

In reports to management, the engineers wrote that "tests with our own pylon material" showed that "brittle components can fracture at as little as 40 percent of their theoretical fracture resistance levels," meaning that their performance falls well short of the applicable safety thresholds. In the RWE engineers' assessment, this constituted a violation of the Energy Industry Act.

The engineers even provided the then-chairman of RWE's power grid division with a detailed explanation of why accidents caused by brittle steel present more than just a theoretical possibility. According to the report, RWE had registered 27 pylon collapses since 1986, "all attributable to brittleness in load-bearing pylon sections." Instead of immediately addressing the problem and thereby eliminating the acknowledged risk as quickly as possible, RWE management apparently took an astonishingly long time to even look into the issue.

One year after receiving their engineers' report, RWE executives were given a second, more extensive "Risk Report on Pylon Steel Brittleness" in July 2002. In addition to confirming earlier fears, this report provides more specific information.

But even then the company failed to take the necessary steps. On the contrary, the documents state that "immediate rehabilitation" of all at-risk pylons was "not possible, because there are insufficient internal and external calculation resources" and "funding is not available for the immediate rebuilding of the pylons at risk of fracture caused by brittleness."

By late 2003, no significant upgrades had been made to the network. Around this time the engineers' warnings finally came to the attention of RWE Group's executive board and its President and CEO Harry Roels. The engineers explained the problem to Roels, a Dutchman, in a 25-page presentation. By then the engineers in the company's network division knew that the situation was precarious, especially since the press was beginning to report on possible problems with the materials used in high-voltage pylons.

As a reflection of their deep concern, the engineers provided Roels with the most detailed information possible, including many photographs of fractured pylons. They also explained the magnitude of the problem: about 25,000 pylons throughout RWE's nationwide network, or about 57 percent of all high-voltage pylons in Germany, were "at risk of fracture caused by brittleness."

A rehabilitation plan was discussed, but apparently its main objective was to keep costs as low as possible for the company. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why the company opted, in a first stage lasting "three to four years," to repair only those "pylons posing the highest risk of criminal liability." 2,700 of these high-risk pylons were listed in the report, and the costs of repair were estimated at only €40 million.

Repairs delayed

A "long-term plan" called for repairing another 4,500 pylons deemed high-risk under civil law, at an additional cost of €70 million. By contrast, rehabilitation of the entire network, at a cost then estimated at about €1.2 billion, was to be stretched out over a period of about 25 years.

The secretive nature of this plan is all the more astonishing because the costs involved would not have presented a particularly daunting financial obstacle to the RWE Group. For years, the group has been reporting record earnings as a result of ongoing electricity price hikes. In 2004 alone, the Essen-based company earned before-tax profits of about €3.7 billion.

Why didn't Roels order the immediate rehabilitation of the entire network? And why did he neglect to inform the government and the public about the dismal state of the power network? Insiders believe that the costs involved could hardly have been a deterrent. Perhaps Roels was concerned that media reports of safety risks would invariably lead to a decline in the company's stock price.

RWE rejects such speculation as completely "inaccurate," while at the same time downplaying the damaging management documents. The company claims that it has gone to great efforts to fix the pylons in the past two years. For example, RWE hired outside experts from the University of Duisburg to analyze its pylons and categorize them according to the risk they posed.

In the context of this analysis, RWE claims that the pylons in Münsterland were also tested and were classified as safe. But it was precisely these pylons, built in 1950/51 and 1960, that ultimately collapsed. The company also claims that it prepared priority lists in which it classified 2,900 pylons as top-priority. These high-risk pylons are those located adjacent to houses or at road intersections.