Barcelona Struggles on Day 2 of Power Blackout
Pastor Dale Morgan
Jul 24, 5:03 PM EDT
*Barcelona Struggles on Day 2 of Power Blackout*
By MANUEL FERNANDEZ
Associated Press Writer
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) -- Shops operated with gas-powered lamps, traffic
lights remained blank and courthouses turned to battery power Tuesday as
Spain's most cosmopolitan city faced Day Two of a major power outage.
The blackout began Monday morning, hitting public transport, hospitals,
homes and businesses, affecting 350,000 customers in all. Power company
Fecsa-Endesa said 50,000 customers were still without power late Tuesday.
Firefighters reported a flood of calls from people stuck in elevators,
and police officers were sent to major intersections to direct traffic.
Barcelona, Spain's second-largest city, has a population of 1.6 million
but attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists all year round. The
outage is a huge embarrassment for a city that considers itself more
European than the rest of Spain and proudly points to the 1992 Summer
Olympics as one of its finest moments.
"How are we going to fight to bring international fairs and other events
to Barcelona with a situation like this?" Barcelona Hotel Association
president Jordi Clos asked, according to the national news agency Efe.
Trials were called off Tuesday at court buildings where workers were
forced to use battery-powered lamps, and some clerks gave up on the
spotty computer service and just kept records by hand, the regional
Justice Department said.
Large hotels hooked up generators, small ones did without, and tourists
were stymied at some major landmarks. The Barcelona airport was not
affected.
The city's main landmark, the Sagrada Familia church designed by Antoni
Gaudi, was without elevators and barred tourists from climbing the
stairs to the top of its towering spires. Despite the restrictions,
tourists lined up Tuesday to see the most frequently visited attraction
in Spain's northeast Catalonia region.
Nursing home manager Alberto Vargas said he forked over $4,150 to rent a
generator for 5 days from a neighboring province because they were sold
out in Barcelona. He was worried about keeping medicine fresh and making
sure his 120 residents didn't fall in the dark.
Although Barcelona, like the rest of Spain, is having a
cooler-than-normal summer, with temperatures around 80 degrees, the
outage meant many businesses and houses had to do without air conditioning.
City officials expressed anger and demanded that the electrical
companies responsible, Fecsa-Endesa and Red Electrica de Espana, carry
out repairs as soon as possible and pay compensation.
"We will not accept the city suffering another night like this," Mayor
Jordi Hereu said.
The Barcelona-daily El Periodico printed front-page photographs of
people using candles in shops and bars.
El Periodico said Catalonia, a wealthy region of which Barcelona is the
capital, paid 25 percent of Spain's electricity bill but only received
15 percent of the money for maintenance.
The outage began when a substation cable fell, causing a chain-reaction
failure in as many as six other substations and a fire in one.
Red Electrica de Espana director Luis Atienza told Cadena SER radio that
major cities needed to increase their sources of electricity to cope
with this kind of accident. He said maintenance investment was not the
issue because it had tripled in the past four years.
Artur Mas, leader of the Convergence and Union coalition, the main party
in Catalonia, said the regional government must pressure utilities to
invest properly in maintenance.
"What has happened is very serious. It gives you the feeling that the
country is not prepared," He said.
Mas was one of those stuck briefly in an elevator.
"Luckily, I haven't got claustrophobia, but I was in the dark, alone,
and my cell phone did not work," he told local radio. "Those minutes
were very long."
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Associated Press reporters Daniel Woolls and Ciaran Giles in Madrid
contributed to this report.