Well, you're already probably sick and tired of hearing about the outage, so this will probably be the last one until whatever caused it is known.

I spoke with a bus driver in Dúrcal, asking her whether the lack of traffic lights was a problem and she responded that it was not, because most people were staying off the roads.

She then told me how a fellow driver had suffered a breakdown in Marchena (Between Padul and Dúrcal) but was unable to phone the company to say what had happened so that another bus could come and pick up his passengers.

Somebody in Dúrcal decided to light a bonfire in the middle of a street, probably because they couldn’t light it in their home. This also happened in the city of Málaga but it was more cleary an act of vandalism.

Then there was the queueing up outside supermarkets to buy water, batteries and candles. You would have though that after the EU warned people in Europe to stock up on tinned food and candles, and having gone through Covid when supermarkets shelves suddenly emptied… especially toilet paper, people would have learnt the lesson.

Actually, it was reminiscent of Britain in the 70s with the 3-day week, extended & repeated blackouts and queues for bread and other food items. The miners were on strike and the power stations that virtually all were coal fed, had to ration out how long they could supply power for each day.

It was also nice to see people gathering on the streets in small groups and actually chatting; even young people. Everybody was trying to glean from each other what was happening. In Madrid, somebody got in his parked car outside his house, wound down the window and put his radio on full blast with the news. People were soon hanging out of their windows listening and shouting comments to each other.

In Granada, in a block of flats mostly inhabited by university students, they were playing a sort of balcony-to-balcony tennis match with cheering when somebody missed the ball and it hit the street below.

In summary, the outage made people more human, more gregarious, just as Covid did, when people hung out of their balcony windows and chatted with neighbours across the street; when a police chief in Motril put the song, I Will Survive on his patrol-car radio and danced to it to rounds of applause from the people above.

Adversity makes us more human, mostly.

(Editorial: Outage Anecdotes)

Keywords: Covid, 3-Day Week, Outage, People Getting Together

editorial, durcal, granada, madrid, marchena, Covid, 3-Day Week, Outage, People Getting Together

Reader’s comment: “The outage was by the climate terrorists” – Philip Verstrepen

Reader’s comment: “Your story about how people reacted to the outage reminded me of similar stories that came out of the US Northeast when we had a significant outage in 2003. 

Power restoration for New York took around 29 hours. New York City and New Yorker’s in general are not exactly renowned for their courteous nature. When that city faced a blackout the reaction of the people was similar to what you chronicled here. For most people, situations like this bring out their better nature. For myself and others I suspect it returns a little bit of our faith in humanity to see this type of reaction to this type of situation.

The more things change, the more they are the same. When that US outage happened in 2003 there was rampant speculation that the outage may have been some form of terror attack. Many folks with their own agendas offered speculation as to what caused the outage and who was to blame. We are all seeing similar reactions to this outage.

If history repeats itself as it usually does, it will probably be a month or more before there is a definitive answer to the question of what caused this outage. For reference, it took roughly three months before the final determination was made on the US Northeast 2003 outage. In the end it was a combination of smaller issues that on their own could have been dealt with but combined it caused a cascade failure and took the grid down despite the efforts of the people working to balance out the loads. I won’t be surprised if we find out that something similar happened on Monday.” – Don