RE: Blackout in Spain, Portugal and parts of France. Decoding "Rare Atmospheric Phenomenon": This either means they "don't know" or "don't want to tell" you the real cause.
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What a crazy day it was! I'm Portuguese and I was working in the office yesterday. The lights went out at 11h30, but we still had internet, because the office has a generator for the internet. I was alone in my workspace because the other 2 people were working from home. I was browsing my phone, and 5 minutes later, I decided to get out, and I saw everyone else very agitated. I learned that it was the whole country plus Spain. Later, we started hearing that other countries were also having the same issue, and we all thought cyber attack from Russia.
I had no lunch, so I went home since I had something to eat. However, I have electric blinds and I didn't raise them in the morning, so I didn't even have natural light at home. I went to my in-laws' so that I wasn't in total darkness. My fiance and I went back home at 19h, since we still had some food left that we could eat cold, and we didn't want it to go to waste. Just as we were about to eat, the lights came back on, so we were able to heat our food.
The whole day, the internet on the phone was working on and off, depending on the provider and where we were. Also, we were running low on battery. I was using my work laptop to charge my phone, but it was very slow.
After that, it was time to try to contact family members to make sure they were well and if they had electricity yet. The worst part was not being very prepared (we should be ready for these types of emergencies) and not knowing how long it would take. There was some information saying that it could take up to 3 days to be restaured and that would suck. Some supermarkets were closed, others weren't, but they had huge lines. People certainly panicked.
That's really a nightmare, luckily it didnt last days, also saw the pictures of train pessengers stranded in the middle of nowhere. What a nightmare and not knowing how long it will take and where to go.
For sure! I was afraid that we'd start seeing pillage during the night if we didn't start getting it fixed before.
Thanks for sharing these personal insights. 🤝🏻
I'm happy to share them!
I remember times in Canada when ice storms downed powerlines, causing power outages that lasted several days, and some remote villages were without power over a week. Example Ice Storm in Ontario
That's crazy and scary! But it's a bit different when 2 whole countries were suddenly out of power! The panic and fear are on a different level because it's difficult to contact other people, and there's the possibility of it being an attack.
There have to be backup systems that kick in. In case of a hack, which is also a possibility, the back-up systems have to be independent of the internet and manually set in motion. A emergency plan has to have that built in, a protocol of procedures. I worked on the railway in Canada in 2000 and we had such a plan in case of Y2K. As it were, hardly any of the fears materialized, most of our operations continued smoothly. But we were prepared for the worse, to keep our trains running.
In Portugal we have the tendency to be unprepared 😅