Our lives unfold, day after day, walking along visible streets and others that are perhaps less well-known but equally essential. This Monday, April 28, 2025, a Monday called to repeat each person's usual procedures with a familiar degree of automatism, has changed radically when the trains we had boarded without any announced incidents have stopped their journey, when the subways we had accessed by elevator and with illuminated stations.
The bread ovens, the ATMs, the traffic lights; the elevators, both collective and individual; all these systems have stopped working, and everyone using them has thought they were failing at the most inopportune moment.
Most hospitals have generators that ensure the life support systems in operating rooms and intensive care units continue to receive power, but countless vacuuming, cleaning, consultation, and diagnostic testing operations are without power. Thus, to varying degrees, the operation of a sensitive service like patient care is severely disrupted.
The doors of many parking lots, the griddles and ovens of many restaurants, the pulse of many water supply systems have stopped working. We live in a society where it's not just humans who go up and down in cars that fill ever-wider highways. Electrical wiring and the flow of electrically charged particles are also part of this noise we call everyday life.
We all discovered the extent of this back and forth of electrons when at 12:36 p.m. it stopped working in an "exceptional incident" that even affected telephone communications and internet networks.
This is an incident that requires the activation of all emergency procedures due to the potential impact it may have on people and, as such, has an unthinkable scope. This Monday we discovered that there is a critical and vulnerable point in the electrical grid of the Iberian Peninsula. This is also an incident that requires the activation of civil protection mechanisms, and as such, it has a variety of situations that, even if we tried to list them all, we would forget some. Public authorities must mobilize and distribute all specialized personnel to the list of cases, an incomplete list because there is always someone in a complicated and undetected situation.
It will be difficult to quantify the impact on elevators in single-family and multi-family homes, on home healthcare support, on unregulated traffic accidents, on water pumping, on work time, and on scares.
Information, as always, has become key to citizens' behavior. The most critical moments have been when the channels through which we receive information available to governments, experts, or acquaintances have been affected. In an emergency, we must know that our relatives are okay; without this information, it is difficult to help everyone who needs it.
For a few hours, in this return to the past that any Monday brought us, we cursed not having batteries for the old transistor radio and looked for a way to listen to specialized voices.
Catalonia, located in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, has been gradually returning to some normality, but, as evening falls, in places without electricity, the security that normally protects people and property will, by its absence, take on greater importance. Right now, in some establishments where they have to put more effort into serving customers, where they've had to resort to old calculators, etc., there are already those who take advantage. Looting is always the most unpleasant side of the day when we also see many people helping others.
The cell phone, almost dead and with no place to charge it, has still provided us with the best service. The multiple flashlights have saved us from many falls.
