I never thought that I would be writing any more meta posts after the Covid and vaccination posts, but here we are, another unexpected and surreal event. With one of my parents away for a week, I was staying with the other one to keep them company. Since I was between projects, we had thought about trying a small trip somewhere, and Murcia by train had been an option. We discarded that, and thought do a Madrid day trip instead. Then I received a notification for a bureaucratic thing I urgently had to take care of on Monday the 28th. The letter scared the bettlejuice out of me, but it turned out to be something easy to deal with – and I was not at any fault – so afterwards we went to have a hot chocolate. It was a small celebratory second-breakfast thing.
We were back home when at 12:33, while I was halfway through my daily kanji review, the power went off. It is not uncommon around my parents’ place lately due to construction nearby. However, it was not the house. Nor the neighbourhood. Nor the town.
There had been a countrywide power outage. It was international too, as Portugal was knocked offline too. Part of France lost power too before they cut off the connection to stop the domino effect, and so did Morocco.
Have you ever considered the effects of a national blackout besides something you’d see in an apocalyptic film? All the traffic lights went off, creating circulation chaos. Hundreds of people were trapped in lifts, thousands on surface and underground trains. The suburban and commuting trains were easily evacuated, but some long distance ones just stopped in the middle of nowhere – and safety procedures sanction that passengers may not leave a stranded train unless there is an emergency inside. They had to wait for external rescue – the military, mostly. Had we taken the train to Murcia, we would have been amongst them.
A smaller number of people – window cleaners – got stuck outside buildings, and the police had to give rides to technicians to open stuck lifts all over. However, most lifts don’t have alarms any more, you have to call their rescue number. Within twenty minutes of the outage, phone lines, fibre, 3G, 4G and 5G became progressively knocked off. Before an hour had passed, there was no way to contact 112 in case of emergency. The only thing transmitting was the radio and they had no real information – though they kept patting themselves on the back that they were still on air.
My parent and I were home, we had a battery-powered radio, and a warm room to be in. We also had running water, but no line of communication with my sibling, who was at work, nor my other parent abroad. Big cities became mousetraps for anyone trying to reach the suburbs or adjacent towns – either to arrive home or to collect children from school.
Some shops and supermarkets could operate cash-only, and we heard the Mayor of Madrid say that people who had an emergency should walk to a police station or a hospital. Healthcare centres do not have power generators, but hospitals do. Around 14:00, the radio relied that restoring the power would take around nine hours, but they did not specify whether that would be from the blackout or the reset, which had to be done gradually in order not to overload the system and knock everything off again. Around 15:00, people who needed oxygen machines at home were directed to head to the nearest hospital.
My parent and I had a cold lunch, readied the torches and candles, and put the phones on plane mode so they did not waste battery trying to find the network. I regularly checked whether I could get any signal or send a text message to my sibling.
Hours passed. I built a 3D wooden puzzle I had around. Around 18:00, the Prime Minister was on the radio saying that the nobody had any idea why the outage had happened, that citizens were behaving spectacularly well, and to only trust official information, which was zero from the highest spheres, and incomplete from more local officers. Some regions asked for a special alarm level which means that they relinquish control to the State level. This is done because otherwise the army cannot be mobilised.
Thousands of people who had been due to take long-distance trains back home, and some who had been rescued from stranded trains were accommodated with a blanket and a sandwich in large train stations for the night. Hotels were only accepting cash payments upfront, so the so-called convenient cashless convenience collapsed – and some of them duplicated or tripled their rates. People who had their luggage in places like the one I used in Barcelona, which are opened with pin pads, could not retrieve their things.
We were fine.
The airports managed surprisingly well, with few cancellations, but passengers coming and going could not reach or leave. People walked along roads with signs stating where they were going in hopes a car gave them a lift. Petrol stations either had to close down or ran out of fuel. Restaurants and bars tried to serve anything that could be eaten cold or raw, and hoped that their freezers and fridges held, and power came back before the legal limit that would force them to throw away all their produce.
People were trapped in endless traffic jams or could not get their cars out of the garage, since the gates only worked automatically, or nobody knew how to open them manually. I wondered whether we should get our car out, but we decided we did not have to go anywhere.
High-schoolers walked home. Younger kids stayed behind until a parent could pick them up, with teachers staying with them, and in some cases even walking them home. News started coming on the radio that power had been restored in some areas of the north (thanks, France), the south (thanks, Morocco) and the east (thanks, Aldeadávila hydropower plant, which practises this exact scenario every three years, despite the government saying that it is impossible to lose all power. It was impossible until it happened.).
Late in the evening, the neighbours decided to light up a barbecue in the garden, and in the process they smoked up the whole neighbourhood. I really hoped for no fire because we were 25 minutes away from the closest firefighter station.
Evening, then dusk, then night. We had a sandwich for supper, illuminated by candlelight.
No more official news. Radio presenters gloated about how beautiful it was that families and strangers sat around transistors. Power crept back through the country, and when it came back people cheered and applauded. No idea what had happened. Sabotage and cyberattack seemed discarded – having someone to blame would have made for a juicy press conference, so it was pretty obvious that they had not happened from the lack of information.
Around 19:30, I managed to get a text message out to my sibling, but there was still no phone line. People were still stuck in trains and stations. We were following the radio, but it was completely dark outside. For a while I had been following which spots and municipalities got their power back, but around 23:30, it was just out of compulsion, it felt. We turned off the radio and went to bed.
It was around 1:30 when a beeping woke me up. The freezer in my parents’ kitchen was alerting that its temperature was higher than -18 ºC. It took me a second to realise what that meant. We had power, 13 hours after it had gone out. I found the button to press and spent the next hour or so catching up with / and checking on everyone I could. It was around this time when the last passengers were evacuated from trains.
I eventually turned in, and at 7:15 we got news from my sibling, who called to say they were all right and had made it home after a coworker dropped them off.
To be honest, I’ve never felt so… unsafe in my whole life. I still do. I was fine, and everyone I know was all right – maybe took hours to go back home, but a family died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to get warm. There was literally no way to contact the emergency service. With the lights out, I kept running in my head how to get to the hospital, the fire station, the healthcare centre… without driving into a mousetrap if there was an emergency.
And what makes me feel unsafe still now is that… I have no answers. The official sources that I am supposed to trust just… try to find a scapegoat. They’re shutting down the nuclear power plants without a reliable alternative to keep the country running… after we have seen how it cannot run. Just because I had the luxury of being all right does not mean everything was fine.
Everything was most definitely not fine. The next day chaos continued. People were stranded in train stations as service got restored. People could not get to work because their underground stops were bolted down.
And the official position is we don’t have an official position. Yes, I’m quoting Independence Day. Spain is the country the aliens would blow up without resistance.
But hey, I got a stress-built wooden pagoda out of it…
JBinnacle – A Travel Logbook 