¡Blackout!

Actually, it wasn´t that bad at all. If you´ve been reading the paper or watching TV, you probably heard that we had a pretty bad blackout in Barcelona on Monday. I guess, at about 11 a.m., some big cables in two substations broke or exploded or something. They don´t know why yet. But this caused a really bad, as you can imagine, power surge, and another substation had an explosion, which looked really bad on the TV. Tons of black smoke spewed out of this building in the Maragell district. So basically, it was so bad that four different sites were affected. That´s bad.

What´s weird was how it affected the city. At 11 a.m., when I had my break between classes, I walked down Gran Via, and the streetlights were out. Barcelonans clearly don´t know how to deal with a situation like that because rather than stopping, and letting people go, they were trying to barrel through the light-less interchange. The only thing that stopped them were the pedestrians, who also didn´t wait for the light. But nothing bad happened. I went to a local bar for a coffee, everything was fine there, and everything was fine at the school, so I didn´t think anything of it.

After class, I walked up to Gracia, and that´s when I realized something had happened because most of Gran de Gracia had no power. The funny thing, or weird thing, was that it was so random. One store would be out, and then the next would be fine. It was very strange. But, of course, Barcelona is such an outdoor city that I don´t think it affected people hugely at first.

My apartment had power, so I ran my air conditioner with impunity.

At 7, I walked back down to Gracia, and Gran de Gracia was fine, but the area surrounding the big market near Plaza del Sol was still out, including Calle Verdi, which is a really important pedestrian street. The Verdi cinemas had no power, but weirdly, Verdi Park in the next block over was fine. How weird is that.

I guess 350,000 customers lost power during the day, and 100,000 were out of power all night. According to the paper, some of the customers around the Maragell station could be out of power for a few weeks! But my friend Marta told me today that everything is supposed to be okay by tonight.

The Spanish reacted in what I now think is their normal way. They just hung out on the streets and talked. There were some mild protests in the areas that were affected during the night. The area around Park Guell was hit bad, and I guess they had some street protests. On Calle Verdi, I overheard a woman say, "¡Qué país!" What a country! And today in the paper, there was lots of discussion about how something like this could happen in Barcelona, and lamented at the poor state of the infrastructure in the city, which I think is somewhat true. The infrastructure has problems, that´s for sure, but blackouts happen in New York from time to time, and every Californian has experienced rolling blackouts. My favorite was when I was in a night class at Fullerton College, and the lights went out, and we had to use our cellphones to find our ways out of the building.

But it´s true that this accident probably shouldn´t have happened in a city as wealthy as Barcelona.

Meanwhile, I go to England on Saturday, where they´re having monumental floods, but my B & B wrote me and told me they´re fine. But I bet it will be raining big time when I´m there. I don´t have the right clothes at all.