Within minutes of the power outage, it seemed, word had spread that it was not confined to a street, a neighborhood, or even a town. The outage that occurred shortly after noon on April 28 was general, affecting the whole Iberian Peninsula, and possibly other countries. No electricity, no phone, no internet. The only news came from the radio or a neighbor who claimed to have heard some fact or other. In Asturias, depending on your exact location, the apagón, or blackout, lasted almost eight hours. The next day, everyone was still talking about how people all across the country were trapped for hours in elevators, on trains, and in subways. A friend recounted for me the anecdotes he had heard. The midday TV news reported on nothing else.
I had been cooking rice when the electricity went out. Within 30 seconds, the timer rang, signaling that the rice was done. People in Spain eat late, typically after two p.m., when kids come home from school, businesses shut for lunch, and government offices close for the day. So with my early meal, I might have been one of very few people that day who enjoyed a hot lunch. But I had no canned food laid up, no sandwich fixings, not even any bread, so what of the evening? The next day? As I drove to work in the city an hour later, people in shop doorways and on street corners were discussing the situation. Talk was of hairdressers caught in the middle of cutting clients’ hair who had to finish the job on a stool set out front on the sidewalk, merchants who couldn’t close metal grills or lock up their businesses, security systems that were down. The possibility of looting once the sun set seemed real. During the eight hours that Asturias was without power, everyone I spoke to assumed we would suffer the outage for days. “This will take time,” seemed to be the consensus. Why did they think so? With no power and no phones, sent home early from their places of work, people had nothing to do but speculate. They imagined the worst.
The three unlit tunnels I drove through on my way to work were not dismaying during the day, but I knew it would be a different experience at night. In the city, I found traffic was not too bad, despite the lack of traffic signals. On the whole, drivers respected the pedestrians gathering at crosswalks. At the two major intersections on my route, police officers directed traffic until the crisis ended just before 8:00 p.m.
Other than traffic lights that didn’t work, police officers in the street, storefronts strangely darkened, and people at their apartment windows to watch whatever might be going on, I saw little out of the ordinary. A few stores were still open for customers with cash, and people lined up outside the hardware store, hoping to buy radios, camping cookstoves, batteries, and candles. The door to my building was propped open, and the entry hall beyond was dim, but windows in the stairwell let in some light, more with each floor I climbed. About half my students attended class. They all told of eating sandwiches for lunch, but none of them knew what food they would have for dinner. One grocery store chain with back-up generators remained open, but most others closed. Most shops couldn’t ring up sales or scan bar codes. People without cash had no way to pay. Banks were closed and automatic tellers were inoperative. Still, no one seemed worried.
My friend hadn’t been worried either. He could have survived the outage for days, he claimed the next morning, explaining that 40 years ago, his father had bought a diesel generator. “This big,” my friend said, raising his arms to delineate its size. He had never had occasion to crank it up. There it still sat, in the basement, next to the fuel oil tank.
Well, I told my friend, you’ll need to see if it works. He agreed. You couldn’t be too prepared.
Any other lessons? Keep candles and spare batteries, have a transistor radio handy, and when at a loss, take to the hills. That had been the decision of the mother of two young children who had no idea how to occupy them without a TV or computer. She put the kids in the car and drove to a nearby recreation area, where they wandered the trails and observed nature. They talked to each other. They spent the time not just in the same space but doing the same thing, together. It was the best afternoon of their lives, the mother reported.
Asturias is full of easy access to nature, and the mother is free to take her children any afternoon of the year. Will she? Will I stock up on canned goods? Will my friend make sure his generator is in working order? Will people remember to keep candles and extra batteries on hand, and some bills in a drawer? Probably not. Instead we’ll recall the apagón as a time when we were put to the test and passed with flying colors.
Power in Madrid wasn’t restored until around midnight, but in Asturias the lights came on in my dusky classroom shortly before class ended at 8:00 p.m. On leaving, I chose the stairs rather than the elevator, just in case. The traffic lights were working, and the police were gone. I drove home through last light. Into the tunnels I went, and I was surprised to find them dark, still unlit by either emergency lighting or by the usual lamps. But nightfall was still some time off, and though the mouths yawned black, once inside the tunnels, I could still see the shimmer of light at the end.
