MADRID:
Power went out across Spain and Portugal on Monday, halting train traffic, clogging roads and trapping people in elevators 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 12:30 pm (1030 GMT), 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, told AFP.
“There’s no (phone) coverage, I can’t call my family, my parents, nothing: I can’t even go to work,” he said.
In Madrid and elsewhere customers rushed to withdraw cash from banks, and streets filled with crowds trying in vain to get a signal on their mobiles. Others were trapped in elevators or inside garages.
As a precaution, play was cancelled at the Madrid Open for the rest of the day.
Due to stop lights being knocked out, cars crawled or stopped altogether as police tried to direct traffic. Authorities told motorists to stay off the roads.
Spain’s railway operator Adif said trains were halted across the country.
Spain’s nuclear power plants also automatically went offline as a safety precaution, with diesel generators maintaining them in a “safe condition”, the Spanish Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) said in a statement.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez held an emergency meeting on the situation, his office said in a Telegram message.
The European Commission said it was in contact with Spain and Portugal over the situation, while European Council President Antonio Costa said on X “there are no indications of any cyberattack”.
The head of operations for Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica, Eduardo Prieto, said “we cannot speculate right now on the causes” of the blackout, but everything was being done to identify its origin.
He added that repairs were already being carried out, but that it would take six to 10 hours to restore power to the country, “if all goes well”.
Red Electrica said later on Monday that power was again flowing in parts of the north, south and west of Spain.
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