The bridge that fed a quarter of Berlin

The Bridge Over the Teltow Canal

At around six in the morning on Saturday 3 January 2026, a fire took hold on a single cable bridge over the Teltow Canal, in the south-west Berlin district of Lichterfelde, where the cables run beside a combined heat-and-power plant. By the time it was out, five 110-kilovolt cables and ten 10-kilovolt cables had been severed at one junction. Roughly 45,000 households and 2,200 businesses across four districts of the capital were dark. They would stay dark, in deep midwinter cold, for more than four days: the longest blackout Berlin has suffered since the end of the Second World War.

Nobody had lost a power station. No generator tripped, no line sagged into a tree, no reactor derated. The German grid at large did not so much as flinch: the national system was carrying tens of gigawatts that morning and went on carrying them, indifferent. What had happened was smaller than any of that and, precisely because it was smaller, harder to fix: a fire at one place where a great deal of a city's electricity happened to pass through the same few metres of cable tray. This is a story about that place, about the four days it took to work around it, and about the uncomfortable thing it revealed: that the part of the power system a modern city actually lives on is not the part anyone builds redundancy for, or points a camera at.

The federal authorities would come to call it terrorism, and a left-wing group would claim it as a strike against fossil fuels and the data centres of the AI boom. Those claims matter, and we will come to them. But the most instructive thing about 3 January is not who lit the fire or why. It is what one fire, in one ordinary-looking spot, was able to do, and how long the modern, redundant, heavily engineered grid of a G7 capital needed to undo it.