Portugal, Spain and France: Lessons from the Blackout

On Monday April 28, the whole of Portugal and parts of Spain and France experienced a total power outage. Lessons?

Photo: Wikimedia Commons by Joe Thomissen, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Шаровая молния

11.33 in the morning. Zoom meetings froze, elevators ground to a halt, some empty, some with three users, some packed. Some passengers with intestinal problems, some carrying small babies. Metro systems stopped suddenly leaving passengers trapped undergound between stations. Traffic lights stopped working.

It is only a local thing, they’ll restore power soon.

Someone just spoke to her husband and it’s in the capital city too.

I heard someone say it’s also in France, Germany, Finland, Hungary, Italy and England. And Sweden. And…and India.

My mobile network is off.

The telephone is down also.

My water has dried up, I will leave all the taps turned on so when it comes back I’ll hear it. I had put the plugs in the sinks to catch what there was.

The cashpoint isn’t working.

The supermarket is closed.

There is no fuel in the petrol stations.

They say the airport is in chaos.

My grandmother has a chest pain, I am going to call the emergency services. Oh, there is no communication, it’s not working.

The big supermarket has a generator, I’ve just been there and bought half a tonne of food. Oh, no elevator? How am I going to get it to the 16th floor? Oh no! I forgot, I will go to buy fish at the market and then I’ll visit the butcher. Bye!

She comes back. Half of the products she left at the base of the lift have been stolen and she has forgotten the fridge and freezer have no power, so what’s she going to do with the meat and fish?

Do you have the power back on yet? No, they say an atomic bomb has been dropped and it’s off all around the world. My neighbour said it was the Russians. I heard someone say at the hairdresser’s that they heard someone say their cousin’s best friend’s boyfriend’s lover said that it was lightning. And thunder!

This was the drama lived by the entire population of Continental Portugal, not the Atlantic Isles (the Azores and Madeira), by those in part of Spain and in Southern France on Monday from 11.33 until 9, 10, 11 at night depending on where they lived. The lady who left her taps open is now in communication with her insurance company to see if they will pay for the flood damage to her apartment and two downstairs neighbours.

Less than twelve hours. Imagine if it was 12 days.

Lesson 1: Be prepared. How many people were prepared for these 12 hours? How many had a radio powered by batteries for communications, how many had a supply of drinking water at home (in 5-litre bottles, replaced every time one is used), how many people had a drum of water to use in the bathroom, cloths for minimal washing? How many had matches, a gas stove, charcoal if they had a garden, a flashlight? How many had beans and lentils and chickpeas and rice stored in bulk? And cash? In this system, money speaks louder than words. If you have plastic money, it is utterlky useless. Those with cash are like those with the sight of one eye leading a crowd of blind people. In this system, prices start to skyrocket, so on day one you buy a bottle of water for 2 Euro, on day 3 it already costs fifteen and by day 20 people are getting robbed in the street if they are seen carrying any. The veneer of human dignity peels off very quickly as the instinct of self-preservation supercedes any notion of mutualism.

Lesson 2: Inter-connectivity. Globalisation does not have to mean crass stupidity. It is obvious that the emergency networks need to have their own system so that if power goes out, people can telephone for na ambulance, or fire service, or the police. It is all very well for the companies operating elevators to say “Call the help number”. How, if the communications networks are out? Ditto, water supply to apartments higher than the third floor of a block. Generators to at least move a Metro train to the next station. It is called being prepared and planning, not just reacting.

Lesson 3: How is it possible that, for instance in the case of Portugal, the entire grid was at the mercy of a third party (supply from Spain)? And with no immediate back-up system? 

Lesson 4: Information. As we can see from the examples reported above, disinformation and misinformation fly faster than information, so Russian attacks with A-bombs spread faster than a simple truth. With the communications networks tied up with the power grid, there is little the authorities can do, except use the radio. And few have one anyway.

Lesson 5: Civility. I am not paying attention to pats on the head from the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen for the good behaviour of the citizens of Spain and Portugal, in fact I listen to nothing she says after she gave the nod to media censorship over the Ukraine military operation, blacking out some Russian news outlets so that the only news people receive tends towards being one-sided and is therefore easily manuipulated. But the point is after 12 hours, in general, people’s behaviour remained…civil. But if it was 3 days? Or seven?

Lesson 6: What happened. We still do not know, because nobody is telling us. A cyber attack? By whom? Always ask Cui bono? To whose benefit? It is easy to blame A, B or C but what do they gain from it? Nothing? Then it wasn’t them True, there were two incidents reported on the British grid the night of Sunday to Monday, again without explanation. Is there any evidence of any connection? Was it a cyber attack?

Given that as journalists we are supposed to offer our readers a reason for reading, I always try to proffer snippets of information which I believe at the time to be true, that is why I only start writing after I have done a lot of reading and listening. In this case, what I have to offer is what I imagine might be a non-technically supported scenario, but I must admit that there are few in this world less technically minded than myself. My skills begin and end at turning on a piece of equipment and turning it off again, even if that means pulling out the plug.

Are the electricity supply networks in Spain (REE) and Portugal (REN) public (state-owned) or private? The anwser is party state-owned and private, respectively. So how are the decision-making processes controlled and to what expent do private interests weigh? Does Spain use all the electricity it produces or does it buy cheaply from Morocco, and sell that at a profit? Does Portugal buy energy from Spain? At the moment of buying, is the Portuguese network inoperative, does this demand during an importation operation place extra stress on the Spanish system, and is this countered by switiching on and connecting to the grid’s hydroelectric plants, which are not designed to be all switched on at once, thus making the system unstable and BANG! the system blows as happens when a fuse goes in your electricity box at home??

These are questions, and lessons. We will have to wait for the answers and also to see whether anyone learns anything from the lessons. Fast forward to Avian Influenza coming next. Did we learn anything from Covid?

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey can be contacted at [email protected]