An emergency has been declared in the eight regions most affected by Spain’s ‘historic’ power outage.
The declaration was made on Monday in Andalucia, Extremadura, Murcia, La Rioja, Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Galicia and the Valencian Community.
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The response is being managed by the Ministry of the Interior, led by Fernando Grande-Marlaska.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez held a series of emergency meetings overnight, reporting at around midnight that almost 50% of the national grid had been reestablished.
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He wrote on X: ‘Citizens should know that all state resources are being mobilized to restore normal supply as quickly as possible.
‘We’ll be working flat out, all night long. With professionalism and commitment. As Spain always does in these situations.’
By 6am on Tuesday, electricity was reported to have returned to 99% of the country.
In an earlier address to the nation, Sanchez confirmed that eight regions had activated the Civil Protection Emergency Plan (Level 3), and that the government would be leading the response.
On the cause of the outage he said: ‘It’s something that specialists haven’t been able to determine yet, but they will, and the institutions are working to understand what happened.’ He added that no hypothesis had been ruled out.
Following two National Security Council meetings on Monday, Minster of the Interior Fernandon Grande-Marlaska chaired an extraordinary action committee to address the consequences of the power outage.
Present at the meeting were the Policia Nacional, Guardia Civil, Ertzantza (Basque Police), Mossos d’Esquadra (Catalan Police) and Navarre Regional Police, as well as the Military Emergency Unit (UME).
Representatives from various government ministries also attended, including from health, finance, transport and defence.
Only the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla were spared from the nationwide outage, which also affected Portugal and some areas of France.
The outage paralysed national infrastructure, communications, roads, trains, airports, schools, and hospitals.
Fortunately, many urgent services were able to continue due to back up generators, such as hospitals.
The Red Electrica de España, the equivalent of Spain’s national grid, branded the blackout of ‘exceptional and extraordinary’ magnitude and ‘historic’.
The cause remains unknown at the time of reporting.
