electricity returns Tuesday in Spain and Portugal after long hours of an “exceptional” power 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 in the evening of applause and cries of joy of the inhabitants, after a long day without electricity, but also most often without the Internet and without a mobile phone.
Around 04:00 am Spanish hour (02:00 GMT) 87.37% of the national electricity supply was restored in continental Spain, announced the manager of the Ree network.
In Portugal, according to the manager of the electrical network, some 6.2 million households had the current in the middle of the night out of a total of 6.5 million.
The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has not risked giving an explanation on the causes of this blackout.
– “no hypothesis discarded” –
“No hypothesis” is “excluded”, he hammered at a press conference. “Never” there had been such a “collapse” of the Spanish network, he continued, adding that “15 gigawatts” of electricity had been “suddenly lost” on the Spanish network, all “in just five seconds”.
“Fifteen gigawatts correspond approximately to 60% of the demand” in electricity of Spain at that time of the day, described the head of government.
His Portuguese counterpart Luis Montenegro, who said Monday evening hoping that the situation would be settled in his country “over the next few hours”, has mentioned a “serious and unprecedented situation” whose origin is to be “probably in Spain”.
The gradual return to normal was good news on both sides of the border, after a long day spent juggling with difficulties, between closed metros, saturated bus, blocked trains and extremely difficult communications.
– Monster traffic jams –
In Lisbon, “I was at the office when suddenly my computer died,” said AFP Edgar Parreira, a 34 -year -old advertiser.
“At the beginning we thought it was a problem in the building, then we started calling our loved ones and we understood that it was the whole city and then that it also happened in Spain,” he added.
In the center of Madrid, inhabitants and tourists gathered in front of the facades of chic hotels or banks, to enjoy a few moments of free wifi still fueled by generators.
-At the end of the day, thousands of people had to patiently cross the city, trying to go home on foot. The large arteries of the capital were prey to monster traffic jams, in the midst of which pedestrians tried to make their way.
Same scenes in Barcelona, where many residents went down to the street, their phone in hand, in search of a hypothetical network.
Long improvised lines have stretched several hundred meters at bus stops. “Look, the tail made a thousand turns,” desperate in Madrid Rosario Pena, a 39-year-old fast food worker. “I have already taken an hour and a half to get here, and I don’t know how much I still have to my house …”
A few hours later, tricolor fires and stores of the shops have enlightened again, a sign of an improvement in the situation, at least in the Spanish capital.
In the Madrid region alone, 286 operations took place to help people trapped inside elevators, according to regional authorities. Monday evening, 11 trains were still blocked in Spain with passengers on board, according to the Minister of Transport.
Air traffic has also been very disrupted, especially at Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon airports, according to the European sky surveillance organization Eurocontrol, but the Spanish Prime Minister stressed in the evening that only 344 flights out of 6,000 scheduled in the country on Monday had been canceled.
“There are no insecurity problems. Our hospital system works properly,” said Pedro Sanchez on Monday, calling on citizens “to act with responsibility and civility”. And in fact, despite chaos and confusion, the atmosphere remained calm and good in the streets of Madrid throughout the breakdown.
– “Exceptional” cut –
On X, President Volodymyr Zelensky said he offered “help” from Ukraine, with his “experience” in “energy problems and in particular power outages” after these “years of war and Russian attacks”.
The power cut, of an “exceptional” magnitude according to Ree, started at 10:33 GMT on Monday (12:33 pm in Spain), causing chaos in transport throughout the Iberian Peninsula.
The supply was partially restored thanks to interconnections with France and Morocco, and gas and hydroelectric power plants were “reactivated throughout the country,” according to Mr. Sanchez.
The Spanish nuclear power plants have been stopped, a normal security procedure in the event of an electricity cut.
In Europe, a failure of the German network on November 4, 2006 had plunged into the dark 10 million people, half of which in France and the rest in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, for almost an hour.
Three years earlier, Italy all, except Sardinia, had been deprived of electricity on September 28, 2003.
