Spain’s power outage exposed the trust gap between government and governed

Anyone thinking of moving to Spain for a quiet life should think again. In the time I have been here I have been evacuated from my house due to a forest fire, been locked down due to a pandemic (but then who hasn’t?), seen my nearest city, Valencia, suffer terrible floods just months ago that claimed the lives of at least 224 people, and now I have just lived through Europe’s biggest ever power outage.

My story of what happened here in Spain on Monday 28 April is probably not much different to most others. It was about midday, my daughter was on Teams with her economics tutor revising for her A levels and I popped out to get some petrol. The first sign I had of something not being right was when I couldn’t open the electric gate when I got back. I assumed the battery had gone on the fob so went in using the pedestrian gate.

My daughter was in the hallway very confused. The power had gone off. Not that unusual where we live but just before it went her tutor had said his had gone too and he lives in the next town. We checked our neighbours but they did not seem to be home so we did what any Spaniard would do – drove to the nearest bar. 

Mobile networks down

Very strange scenes greeted us. People were milling about with some holding their phones up. We looked at ours. No mobile phone network, no 4G, no anything. 

As we got out of the car three old men walked by. “So that’s Spain, Portugal, and France are out,” I heard them say. 

I went over to them to ask what they meant, and they explained the three countries had no power (we later found out it was only parts of France that had been affected). 

Back in the car and we put the local radio on. It always worries me when rather than hearing Spanish I hear the local dialect of Valenciano. But cyber-attack turns out to be the same in any language and that is what was being said. 

Hospitals had switched to generators and the advice from the authorities was to stay at home (we have heard that one before). The police were asking people to stay off the roads as the traffic lights had failed. The Spanish government was meeting and the prime minister would be making a statement later that day.

I felt as if I was living in a bonus episode of Black Mirror. This is what dystopian feels like.

We returned home and shortly after my husband came back. The petrol stations had closed and I was so glad I had just filled up. 

Anxieties and making do

Petrol stations being closed adds to the anxiety but perhaps power is needed to work the pumps. A couple of shops remained open as they had generators, but cash was now king again as credit card machines weren’t working. In the bars and restaurants that stayed open waiters were sometimes guessing at prices and adding up using pen and paper. 

Our whole house is electric. Solar powered with three good sized batteries but that did not help us at all as the local electricity supplier pretty much insists you remain connected to the grid, so no grid no power despite what is in our batteries. My concern was how I was going to cook dinner.

We are not preppers but we are campers. We had a Calor gas one ring camping stove, a couple of strong battery powered lights, about 100 AAA batteries (left behind in error by the alarm-maintenance guy who had come the other day), loads of bottled water, a freezer full of batch cooked food (obviously that had a shelf life but keep a full freezer shut and food should be ok for 48 hours.) Worryingly just weeks ago governments across Europe and the UK were talking about the need to survive for 72 hours.

The camping stove did its job and we settled down after dinner to play cards and Scrabble. It is so strange having no contact with the outside world. There was certainly that Covid vibe of a family just having each other. About midnight and we were packing up the Scrabble and the lights just came on.  It was about an hour later before the mobile phone network and 4G came back.

Dystopia and public discourse

The next day it was almost as if nothing had happened. For me that was even more dystopian. This was the biggest ever power outage in the developed world. It demonstrated the fragility of our modern society, and it gave meaning to all those warnings from government about the need to be able to survive for 72 hours without those things we all take for granted.

However, something has changed and that is public attitudes and public discourse. 

Working in crisis communications means part of what I do is to look on the dark side. The ‘what if this happens, what if that happens.’ It does tend to make you a little cynical. I usually find most people don’t think like that. But emerging back into the normal world post the outage I found people openly questioning the narrative they were being given via CNN and Reuters of a “rare atmospheric event.”

The government said: “Citizens must know that the government will get to the bottom of this. Measures will be taken and all private operators will be held accountable. To this end, the Spanish government has concluded a commission of inquiry led by the Ministry for Ecological Transition.” Which basically means they do not know what caused the outage but many of the local people I speak to are openly saying things such as, “This is about control” or “That was just the curtain raiser to what they are planning.” I am not sure who “they” are, and I don’t think those saying such things know either.

What it does point to is yet again a lack of trust in traditional sources of authority. Here in Spain, the outage and the vacuum from government in terms of the cause and the credibility needed that it can put things right, has fed into the existing narrative of a gap between government and governed. 

As my local newspaper editorial said: “We elect politicians – they are paid handsomely… They were not left in the dark, neither physically nor metaphorically. They have the knowledge they are refusing to share with people they are sworn to protect. They are not keeping us safe.”

A trust gap this big is a risk to us all.

Chris Tucker is co-chair of the CIPR Crisis Comms Network where this blog was first published.

Read more crisis comms insight from Chris Tucker

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