Power went out across Spain and Portugal on Monday, halting train traffic, clogging roads and trapping people in lifts before electricity started to return to some areas after hours of disruption.
As Spain’s government scrambled to find the cause of the outage, which hit at 12.30pm local time, ordinary people were left in the dark – often literally – as to what was happening.
“People were stunned, because this had never happened in Spain,” Carlos Candori, a 19-year-old construction worker who had to exit the paralysed metro system in Madrid, said.
“There’s no [phone] coverage, I can’t call my family, my parents, nothing: I can’t even go to work,” he said.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Monday that a problem in the European grid caused the huge power outrage, but that the cause was still being determined.
“We still do not have conclusive information about the reasons for this outage … It’s better not to speculate, we will know the causes, we do not rule out any hypothesis,” Sanchez said in a televised address.
Comments are closed.