After the emergency, normality gradually returned. The question remains as to what caused the sudden loss of 15,000 MW of energy produced, 60% of the total. Those hours will remain in our personal and collective memory, showing the extent to which electricity is present in our lives. .
All Spaniards will remember where they were at 12.33pm on Monday 28th April. It was the moment of the ‘great blackout’, a power failure of historic proportions. It had never happened before. Suddenly we had no connections, no fridges, no trains, no metro, no traffic lights, no screens, no GPS, no data phones… For a few endless hours, life took a leap into the past. And each of us has our own story to tell about those hours. In some cases, a traumatic one, like that of the hundreds of people trapped in lifts or the thousands stuck in subways and trains.
Once again, the civic behaviour of citizens and the smooth functioning of public services – from the fire brigade to health centres, schools and civil defence – mitigated the impact of the emergency. Radio, in the form of old-fashioned transistor radios, once again proved to be an essential means of communication in times of crisis when all other media go dark.
In the early hours of Tuesday 29 April, Red Eléctrica, the public company that manages the network, announced that more than 90% of service had been restored. In Catalonia, the power began to return in the afternoon, like an oil slick from the northern regions. The slowest to recover is the rail service, the infrastructure most affected by the major blackout. Thousands of passengers spent the night in stations.
Train services in Barcelona continue to be disrupted by tensions in the electricity network. After Monday’s blackout, Renfe had planned for 60% of the Cercanías service (commuter trains) to run today, albeit with delays on some lines.
On Tuesday morning, the cause of the blackout remained a mystery. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, admitted in the press conference following the blackout that the exact causes of the blackout were still unknown and insisted that ‘all hypotheses are still open’. Sánchez urged the public ‘not to speculate’. What is known for now is that ‘the blackout began after a very strong oscillation in the power flows’, the president explained. For five seconds, 15,000 MW of the energy being produced suddenly disappeared, equivalent to 60% of the electricity being consumed at the time, according to Red Eléctrica sources. This huge loss of generation caused the collapse.
As for the organisation of the working day on Tuesday, the government reminds us that “people who cannot go to work because of difficulties in travelling (due to recommendations from the authorities or due to restrictions on any type of public or private transport) have leave and rights guaranteed and recognised in the Workers’ Statute”.
The ‘great blackout’ left us with an indelible personal experience and a reflection on the extent to which our lives depend on electricity. Paper maps, cash, transistors, landline telephones, torches… suddenly regained a value we thought they had lost. But above all, the emergency showed how important it is to have efficient public services in difficult times.
