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Europe|Stuck in a Dentist’s Chair, and Other Blackout Tales From Spain and Portugal
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/world/europe/spain-power-outage-blackout.html
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Even as electricity was restored across Spain and Portugal after a daylong blackout, residents tried to make sense of 18 hours of the “insanity.”
By Jonathan Wolfe and José Bautista
Jonathan Wolfe reported from Murcia, Spain. José Bautista from Madrid.
April 29, 2025, 11:59 a.m. ET
Rocio Vilaplana, a dentist in southeastern Spain, was closing a suture in a patient’s mouth during oral surgery early Monday afternoon when the lights went out.
“Everything started beeping,” Ms. Vilaplana said.
Her backup generator kicked in, the emergency lights in her surgery room flickered on and the 36-year-old dentist tried to remain calm. “Let’s just close it properly,” she thought to herself.
Dr. Vilaplana finished the delicate procedure, but it would be the beginning of a day of frayed nerves and widespread confusion across Spain and Portugal, as a daylong power outage brought life to a standstill for tens of millions. People spent the night in train stations huddled under blankets, stuck in their apartments without water or working elevators, staring at their suddenly useless cellphones and wondering what had happened.
On Tuesday, with electricity almost entirely restored in the two countries — though the cause of the outage remained under investigation — many people reflected on the anxiety of being left not only without power, but also without cellphone service, internet access or the ability to pay for anything except with cash.
In Murcia, a city in southeastern Spain, the word on many residents’ lips on Tuesday morning was “locura” — insanity.
“The worst was the lack of communication,” said María José Egea, 71, who spent a nervous evening in her seventh-floor apartment, the elevator out of service. Neighbors came to check in on her, she said, although good information was scarce and rumors about the cause of the blackout flew.
