Early yesterday afternoon, I walked home from my local supermarket empty-handed. In the Andalucian town of Antequera, the power and internet had just disappeared, card machines weren’t working and I had no cash. As I tried to remember what I had in the cupboards, I passed a woman on the street shouting up to someone on a balcony, ‘It’s all over Spain, France, Germany and Portugal’. Whatever she was talking about, I thought, it obviously had nothing to do with the power outage. It had been a windy night. A pylon had probably been brought down somewhere nearby.
The blackout revealed a fact about our society that we don’t like to confront: as well as giving us power and freedom, our technological sophistication also makes us vulnerable
The woman I passed wasn’t entirely accurate, but she was closer to the truth than I was. At around 12.30 p.m. local time yesterday, the entire Iberian peninsula, as well as a small part of southern France, suffered a massive power outage.
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