Rimini, August 21, 2026 – The checkouts suddenly stop, the refrigerators stop working, and the automatic doors no longer open. At the Lidl in Rivazzurra, still full of customers less than an hour before closing, evacuation is triggered. It is one of the consequences of the long blackout that on Thursday evening left a large area of Villaggio del Sol and upstream of State Road 16 in the dark for over three hours.
The interruption started around 8:40 PM and affected the neighborhood between Marvelli, Ghinelli, Frioli, Romagnoli streets and the surrounding roads, an area that has grown a lot in recent years with new homes, residential complexes, mechanical workshops, and service companies.
However, the first signs had already appeared in the afternoon. “We had a power outage lasting about fifteen minutes and managed to contain the problems,” says a Lidl employee. In the evening, the situation was very different. “Around 8:30 PM the checkouts, refrigerators, and doors stopped working. We immediately called the fault service and were told that the problem on the line was significant.”
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The supermarket, which closes at 9:30 PM, was still crowded at that time. “We had to get all the customers out through the emergency doors, with alarms continuing to sound for quite some time. Then we had to empty the refrigerators and secure the goods.” The store has a generator, but the inconveniences were still significant. Later in the evening, an electrical line was provided to the supermarket that allowed them to handle the emergency.
Residents without power for a long time
Problems also for the neighborhood residents. Several calls were made to the fault service to understand the origin and especially the duration of the outage, but not everyone, residents say, managed to get precise information. Alessandro, a resident in the area, reports that later an excavation was carried out on Ghinelli street, near an electrical network installation. The episode also draws attention to the resilience of distribution networks. Extreme weather events and consumption peaks can put pressure on infrastructures, making not only the availability of energy but also the network’s ability to distribute it continuously increasingly important.
