A RETIRED teacher from Dumfries has shared his experience of the power outages in Spain earlier this week.
Terry Breen was out running errands near his holiday home in Costa Blanca on Monday when the whole country lost electricity, as well as internet and phone services.
Recalling the initial outage, Terry said: “It was right out of the blue, I was heading to the supermarket and to the garage as I was planning to travel back to Scotland the next day. The first sign that there was something wrong was when I went to the petrol station and it wasn’t open and the guy was inside and he was waving at me, I couldn’t hear what he was saying, the door wouldn’t open and I realised the garage was closed for some reason. I thought maybe it was siesta-time but garages don’t normally close for that.
“So I went to a fully automated garage in a nearby town and it obviously wasn’t working either, the screens were blank. But I hadn’t realised it was a widespread thing, it was just a bit inconvenient. When I got to the supermarket the doors wouldn’t open, but I could see people inside and one of the members of staff was outside and he explained that they had no electricity and that the whole of Spain and Portugal had no power and this was about 12.30 pm.”
By the time the 61-year-old returned to his home, all of his neighbours were out in the street trading theories about what was wrong.
Concern soon set in about his plans to travel home on Tuesday as there was no information about the extent of the outages.
Terry added: “There was no way to access information, no news, no radio about what was going on, and when you don’t know you try to fill in the gaps. There were lots of theories floating about from a terrorist attack, a fault with an underwater cable, the Russians were favourite, but people were coming out with all sorts of crazy ideas.
“I then started to worry about my trip home the following morning, my flight was at 7.40 am so I had to be at the airport for about 5.30 am, and initially I wondered if the airport was even open.
“Eventually I found that Alicante Airport has its own system of generators so there was a chance I would get home on Tuesday.
“But I made my mind up that I was going to go to the airport and see if the flight was going.”
Power was restored around 7.30 pm on Monday evening and Terry made it to the airport and was able to travel home.
Relieved to be back in Scotland, he added: “It was quite an anxious experience, even after the power and phones came back on it was very patchy, but all’s well that ends well.
“It’s very strange that we still don’t really know what happened, but they’ve ruled out a cyber attack which is reassuring.
“I am just glad that I got back without too much hassle and everything turned out ok.”
