Trains halted and taps run dry as power outage hits Iberia

Spain’s interior ministry declared a state of emergency, which it said would be applied in any regions that requested it. The Community of Madrid, Andalusia and Extremadura have asked for the central government to take over public order and other functions.

In scenes reminiscent of Zero Day, a Netflix drama starring Robert De Niro about a widespread cyberattack paralysing the United States, passengers on the Metro underground were plunged into darkness while being unaware of the catastrophic outage. Hospitals were forced to switch to back-up generators. Telecommunication networks also crashed, causing disruption to major mobile phone services.

Nearly nine hours after the blackout brought the peninsula to a standstill, Spain’s transport minister said 11 trains remained stranded with passengers on board.

In cities there were enormous queues at ATMs that had power as cash once again became king. In shops, card machines and tills were rendered obsolete. Cashiers, who would once have been the kings and queens of mental arithmetic, were forced to add up the cost of goods on their phone calculators.

Spain’s interior ministry said it had deployed some 30,000 police officers.

On Monday night Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, urged the public to use phones “responsibly”. It was a critical moment for telecommunications in the country and h e told people to use phones only for brief calls and necessary communication. He said the government was investigating why electricity generation was “suddenly” lost earlier. “It had never happened before.”

“All the resources of the state are being mobilised from minute one,” he said. By midnight on Monday, the government said electricity supplies had been restored to about half of the country.

The Portuguese grid operator said a rare atmospheric phenomenon in Spain had caused the power outages across the Iberian peninsula and warned that fully restoring the country’s power grid could take up to a week. Late on Monday, Portugal’s prime minister, Luis Montenegro, said he was confident that the restoration of supply will be complete in the next few hours.

Sánchez, however, said the cause was unknown and warned against speculation. European officials said there were “no indications” of a cyberattack.

Red Eléctrica Nacional, the Spanish grid operator, said the blackout was “exceptional and totally extraordinary” and could take up to ten hours to repair. From 1pm voltage began to be restored in the north and south of Spain, which it said would help to progressively restore the electricity supply nationwide.

Yet progress was chronically slow and officials found themselves in a race against the sun. By mid-afternoon all power in Spain was coming either from wind, solar or hydro, with some assistance from France and Morocco. So-called black starts, the procedure for restarting a power grid after a total or partial shutdown, are considerably complex and slow. Spain, Portugal and France last rehearsed such a catastrophic failure in 2016. It begins by restoring the supply at “electrical islands” which are around generating units with black-start capacity, eventually reconnecting the units to form a fully functioning grid again.

Ben Lambert, a British expatriate based near Lisbon, said there were “huge queues” at his local supermarket as people rushed to buy pasta, tins of food and long-life milk. “The water had sold out within an hour,” he said.

Transport was particularly badly hit. In Lisbon, the streets were choked with traffic and queues for buses snaked around blocks. Police had taken over from traffic lights, using whistles and hand signals to clear the blockages.

By early evening Spanish ministers had confirmed that inter-city train services would not be restored that day although about 80 per cent of flights were operating. Metro train services in Lisbon and Porto were also closed.

• What caused the power outage in Spain and Portugal?

In Spain rescue workers were still attempting to evacuate passengers who became stuck on trains after the power failed.

One high-speed train from Seville had been heading towards Barcelona when it was halted in the countryside outside Zaragoza. Passengers reported being stationary for two and a half hours with no electricity, wi-fi or air conditioning.

Firefighters who boarded the train said the priority was to open all the doors to ventilate the train, while avoiding a panicked rush by passengers to escape, as they tried to arrange an organised evacuation.

“We opened the doors to help ventilate the train for the young and old,” Ruben Sole, 36, a firefighter, said. “I’ve never seen this [the power cut] before on a train like this — it happens in cities but not on the train.”

Gibraltar remained unaffected because the Rock is not connected to the European network. Therefore, Gibraltar’s electricity generation and distribution network operated normally.

Nearly 400 flights were delayed at Madrid airport by the middle of the afternoon, more than half of scheduled services. At Lisbon airport, where all landings were stopped for several hours, 171 flights were delayed and almost 200 flights cancelled. Aena, which runs most Spanish airports, said it was relying on back-up power supplies to operate. Cancellations were made worse because crews were unable to travel to airports.

Engineers face a difficult balancing act. Act too fast and the grid can trip again. Take too long and some power might struggle to restart.

“We are going to go through some critical hours before we totally recover electricity,” Sánchez said.