The traffic lights blink from red to green again. The meters were running in Madrid and Lisbon. And the waiters served food and generous beer and wine to customers on restaurant terraces along more calmly than normal streets.
A day after Spain and Portugal were run over by extensive blackouts, electricity had returned to most of the areas of both countries on Tuesday, leaving many relieved but also very critical about what the energy failure had falls exactly.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez or Spain said his country had recovered more than 95 percent of total supply at 6.30 in Tuesday morning. In Portugal, a spokesman for the Electricity and Gas provider REN said that energy had been restored to all substations of the country’s network and that everything was “100 percent operational.”
But the cause of the blackout, which varied to dozens of millions of people in the Iberian Peninsula, was still unknown.
Eduardo Prieto, services director of the National Electric Company of Spain, Red Electric, said they were not “definitive conclusions” about the reasons for the interruption.
Hey joined a choir of officials who declared that there was no cyber security attack. But also ruled out human error and weather causes.
The Spanish electricity system had been closed after being beaten by two separate power cuts, a second and a half separate, he said.
“This may seem like a small amount,” he said, “but in the electric world, it is a significant amount.” The closures had occurred in southwest Spain, he added.
Sánchez said that his government’s second priority, after ensuring that power had the leg full of restored, was to analyze what had caused the closure, both through a technical analysis committee nationwide and through the commission.
“Citizens must be clear that the Spanish government will reach the end of this matter and will implement the necessary measures to ensure that this never happens again, and that we hold private operators responsible,” Sánchez said Tuesday. He said he was waiting for answers within “hours or days.”
A judge of the Spanish National Court ordered that reports be presented within 10 days, including one of the Police headquarters and another of the National Intelligence Department in charge of cyber attacks.
Portugal Prime Minister Luís Montenegro said that an independent technical committee of seven members would evaluate the management of the crisis, including government communications and the resistance of the country’s electrical and infrastructure system.
“We need an answer that is as fast as Urgent,” said Mr. Montenegro, who goes to an election on May 18, and was supposed to discuss the opposition leader, Pedro Nuno Santos, Monday night, when the power was still out. That debate was rescheduled for Wednesday night.
Kristian Ruby, general secretary of Eurelectric, a commercial agency that repeats the European electricity industry, said it could take months to complete the technical analysis.
But certain initial information has already emerged, he said. Around noon on Monday, a high voltage connection between France and Spain was interrupted. The energy cut occurred about 30 minutes later.
While that interruption would have the disruptive leg, it would usually not lead to a “collapse of the system” like the one seen on Monday, Ruby said. Something more normally would need to happen, “as a sudden interruption in an energy plant, a sudden development on the demand side,” he said. “Then you can have an incident like this.”
Mr. Ruby described the interruptions “somewhere on the scale between an event of 50 to 100 years.”
Both Spain and Portugal closed Monday afternoon. The traffic lights darkened, the trains and the underground stopped, the elevators stopped, many with people trapped inside.
Companies, factories and schools close, and airports delayed and canceled flights.
There were also problems to connect to the Internet and telephone networks, leaving many bewildered and unable to obtain information.
Joe Mert, a professor of geology at the University of Florida, said he and his wife Michelle were among the 35,000 passengers stranded in Spain in Spain on Monday afternoon.
They made leg trips from Madrid to Valencia as part of their 30th anniversary celebration trip. Instead, more than 11 hours spent looking at the fields of the farm on the outskirts of Madrid in the attenuated light and then in the dark, he said.
Finally, around midnight, Meerts went to climb to another train and then slowly for a diesel engine back to the Atocha station in Madrid. There, the workers and soldiers of the Red Cross distributed blankets to multitudes of travelers arriving during the night.
“It was full. People were lying everywhere,” Meert said, 67. In the morning, the couple was able to take another train to restart the trip.
When the lights suddenly turned Monday night, the cheers exploded in Madrid.
In cities in Spain and Portugal, life returned in Spurts on Tuesday. While the undergrounds were back in Madrid and Lisbon, the National Railroad System of Spain reported that many of their nearby trains had reduced the service or were canceled.
The Spanish Ministry of Transportation reported that all airports were operating. In Portugal, the Minister of Infrastructure, Miguel Pinto Luz, announced that he would take “two or three days” so that the flights return to normal at the Lisbon International Airport.
“Yesterday, there were no practical flights, and they supported today’s flights,” Pinto Luz told the news channel.
The mobile phone and the fiber optic service were working again. Madrid Open, an international tennis tournament, returned to work on Tuesday after the interruption forced the 22 -games canelization on Monday. The schools opened in both countries, some thought with low assistance.
“It seems that everything is better today, but I don’t understand how something like this is possible with all the technology we have today,” said Doroteeo García, an 87 -year -old retiree, walking with difficulties near a Madrid and station. He had spent the day before caught in his department, he added, because the elevator was not working.
“I lived canned sardines all day because I couldn’t cook,” he said.
In the center of Lisbon, the parks were full of runners and stretchers on Tuesday afternoon and the grocery stores, which had closed the crisis of the letter, returned to the businesses.
In Rodas restaurant, the tables were prepared for lunch. The manager, Hugo Carvalho, said the restaurant had not suffered great losses due to the electricity cut.
He pointed out that the restaurant closed at 6 pm duration of the blackout and that the only thing that had to worry was the ice cream in the freezer.
“We ate that,” said Mr. Carvalho, smiling.
Azam Ahmed Lisbon contributed reports; Tiago Carrasco de Peniche, Spain; Jonathan Wolfe de Murcia, Spain; and John Yoon Of Seoul.
