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General view of an empty court as the matches get suspended due to a power outage at the Madrid Open on Monday, April 28. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters via CNN Newsource)
By Rob Picheta, CNN
(CNN) — Spain and Portugal are racing the setting sun as they respond to a massive, unexplained power outage that knocked out traffic lights, caused chaos on roads and in airports, and threatened to plunge tens of millions of people into darkness on Monday.
Portugal’s grid operator Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN) said electrical supply was lost across the entire Iberian Peninsula, and in parts of France, shortly after midday. It could be several hours until power is fully restored, Spain’s grid operator said, meaning families and businesses around the country could be without energy come nightfall.
The outage took out lighting and power sockets, and caused subway systems to suddenly fail. Some power began to trickle back across Spain hours later, but efforts to fully revive the grid and to identify the cause have not yet been successful.
In Madrid, traffic piled up on the roads after the lights went out. “I was driving and suddenly there was no traffic lights… It was a bit of a jungle,” Luis Ibáñez Jiménez told CNN. “I saw a massive bus coming, and I had to accelerate a lot to go past it.”
The cause of the blackout was unclear, but its impact was dramatic: transport hubs were shuttered and governments in both countries, which share a population of around 60 million people, hastily arranged emergency meetings to co-ordinate a response.
Madrid’s mayor José Luis Martinez Almeida asked people to minimize their movements and only call emergency services if it was truly urgent. He also called on people to clear the roads for emergency workers. Later in the day, Madrid’s emergency services provider urged the country’s government to declare a national emergency, and local leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso asked the country to deploy the army.
Portugal’s grid operator said restoring power was a “complex operation.” “At the moment it is impossible to predict when the situation will be normalized,” it said.
Efforts could stretch into the night. “The experience of other similar events that have taken place in other countries indicate to us that this process – the total reestablishment of the electrical supply – will take several hours, Eduardo Prieto, director of services for system operation at Red Eléctrica, Spain’s national grid operator, told broadcaster La Sexta.
“We could be talking about six to 10 hours, if everything goes well, until we reestablish supply to every last customer,” said Prieto, who was speaking in the early afternoon.
Portugal’s Prime Minister blamed his neighboring nation for the scenes. Luis Montenegro said his government did not yet know what caused the cut, but that it “did not originate in Portugal” and “everything indicates” that the problem started in Spain.
Confusion grips major cities
Monday’s blackout hit a huge and busy swathe of southern Europe. Dozens of Iberian cities, like Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville and Valencia, are major hubs for transport, finance and tourism. Two of the five busiest airports in the European Union in 2023 were Madrid’s and Barcelona’s, according to EU data.
For a few hours, modern routines were suspended: cash replaced card payments, police officers used arm signals to direct traffic, and restaurants, supermarkets and stores closed their doors. Madrid’s firefighters carried out 174 “elevator interventions” across the city on Monday, its Emergency Information Office said, and some shoppers stocked up on essentials and on canned goods.
The worst-case scenarios appear to have been averted, at least in the first hours of the blackout. Spain’s nuclear sites were declared operational and safe, while Portugal’s National Institute for Medical Emergencies said it had “activated its contingency plan,” running its telephone and IT systems through a back-up generator. Spain’s health ministry said the same process happened in hospitals there.
But travel was hit harder. Flights at major airports in the region were suddenly delayed or canceled, with travelers scrambling to adapt; online flight trackers reported that several airports saw their frequent departures suddenly halted after midday. Portugal’s flag carrier TAP Air Portugal told people not to travel to the airport until further notice.
Ellie Kenny, a holidaymaker inside Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport, said hundreds of people were stood in the dark in lines, with no air conditioning or running water. Shops were only accepting cash, she told CNN.
Trains were also suspended in Spain. And darkness suddenly descended in subway tunnels; video posted on social media showed blackened subway cars stuck in standstill on platforms in Madrid, where the metro was suspended and entrances to stations were taped off.
Sporting events were impacted too. Tennis fans at the Madrid Open filed out of courts after the outage caused play to be suspended.
Some parts of southern France, near the Spanish border, felt a more sporadic impact.
Emilie Grandidie, a spokeswoman for France’s electricity transmission operator RTE, told CNN there was “a small power cut” in the French Basque Country; “It lasted only a couple of minutes and was restored very quickly,” she said.
For several hours on Monday, tens of millions of people were asking each other when power would return, and why it was knocked out in the first place.
Neither question was easy to answer. But once power returns, it could still take days to untangle the damage caused by Monday’s worrying blackout.
Spain’s transportation minister said medium and long-distance trains won’t resume service until at least Tuesday, and the impact of a huge backlog in flights could stretch throughout the week.
The-CNN-Wire
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Grace-Anne Smith 
