Electricity returns Tuesday in Spain and Portugal after long hours of an “exceptional” energy cut, of unknown origin, which sowed chaos throughout the Iberian Peninsula. In the streets of different districts of Madrid, the return of the current was often accompanied on the night of applause and screams of joy of the inhabitants, after a long day without electricity, but also often without the Internet and without a mobile phone.
Around 5 AM, 92.09% of the National Electricity Supply was restored to Continental Spain, announced the Ree Network Manager. In Portugal, according to the electricity network, some 6.2 million homes had the current in the middle of the night of a total of 6.5 million.
The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, did not run the risk of giving an explanation about the causes of this blackout that began at 12:33 on Monday. “Without hypothesis” is “excluded”, he hit a press conference. “Never” had been a “collapse” of the Spanish network, he continued, adding that “15 gigawatts” of electricity had been “suddenly lost” in the Spanish network, all “in just five seconds.” “Fifteen gigawatts correspond to approximately 60% of demand” in the electricity of Spain at that time, described the head of government.
His Portuguese counterpart, Luis Montenegro, on the other hand, mentioned a “serious and unprecedented situation” whose origin is “probably in Spain.”
“My computer died”
The gradual return to normal was good news on both sides of the border, after a long day of juggling with difficulties, among closed meters, saturated buses, blocked trains and difficult communications. In Lisbon, “I was in the office when suddenly my computer died,” said AFP Edgar Parreira, 34 years old. “At first we thought it was a problem in the building, then we started calling our loved ones and we understood that it was the entire city and then that it also happened in Spain,” he added.
In the center of Madrid, the inhabitants and tourists met in front of the facades of elegant hotels or banks, to enjoy free Wi -Fi moments still fed by generators. At the end of the day, thousands of people had to patiently cross the city, trying to go home on foot. The main arteries of the capital were prey to the monster jams, in the midst of which in Zigzagiad pedestrians that tried to make their way. The same scenes in Barcelona, where many residents went to the street, their phone in hand, in search of a hypothetical network.
Long improvised lines have stretched several hundred meters in bus stops. “Look, the tail made a thousand shifts,” desperately in Madrid Rosario Pena, a 39 -year -old fast food worker. “I have already took an hour and a half to get here, and I don’t know how much I have home …”, he deplored. A few hours later, tricolor fires and stores in stores have illuminated again, a sign of an improvement in the situation, at least in the Spanish capital. In the Madrid region alone, 286 operations were carried out to help trapped people within the elevators, according to regional authorities.
On Tuesday morning, three trains were still blocked in Spain with passengers on board, according to the Minister of Transportation Oscar Puente. High speed rail traffic is normally resumed on Tuesday morning in several main lines, including Madrid-Barcelona and Madrid-Valence, but remains interrupted in others such as Barcelona-Aliante and between Madrid and Galicia (North West), wrote in X.
Very disturbed air traffic
Air traffic has also been very interrupted, especially in the airports of Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon, according to the European Wail Sky Surveillance Organization. But the Spanish prime minister emphasized at night that only 344 flights of 6,000 scheduled in the country had been canceled on Monday.
“There are no insecurity problems. Our hospital system works correctly,” said Pedro Sánchez on Monday, asking citizens “to act with responsibility and courtesy.” And in fact, despite chaos and confusion, the atmosphere remained calm and good in the streets of Madrid throughout the collapse. The supply was partially restored thanks to interconnections with France and Morocco, and the gas and hydroelectric power plants “reactivated throughout the country,” according to Pedro Sánchez. Spanish nuclear power plants have a normal safety procedure in case of an electricity cut.
In Europe, a failure of the German network on November 4, 2006 had become the 10 million dark people, half of which in France and the rest in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, for almost an hour. Three years before, Italy, except Sardinia, had been deprived of electricity on September 28, 2003.
Source: BFM TV
