I had been out gardening since the morning, so I didn’t realize the power was out until I went back to the house to take a break. Power outages are already frequent in our area, so I didn’t think much of it—I just washed my face, changed clothes, and started making lunch. It did seem like the power was out longer than normal, so I started to worry that I might have accidentally cut an important power line when I was digging with the hoe. Still, I didn’t dwell on it much and continued on with my lunch preparations.
After a while though, several people from the village started stopping by. It was from them that I learned about the huge blackout. Everybody was out in their yards chatting about it. The men started exchanging information with their smartphones in hand, and several possibilities started to emerge.
“It might be a cyberattack.”
The news brought out my tendency to immediately jump on the bandwagon. “It was bound to happen sooner or later!” I thought. It’s alarming to think calmly about cyberattacks, but the fact is that Sweden actually experienced a cyberattack a few years ago. One of the members of the group pointed out that the German-speaking media advised people to prepare for cyberattacks just two weeks ago. Personally, I had just been watching Zero Day with Robert De Niro, a thriller miniseries where a cyberattack shuts down power across the United States and hacks all of the communications infrastructure. The fact that everyone in the group had been amassing information about cyberattacks over the last month or so made the rumors seem that much more believable. Everyone was saying how cyberattacks were a real threat these days, though it seemed more like a movie plot than real life.
Lisbon, it turned out, was having a terrible time of it as we spoke.
People had wrapped up work early and gone home, but none of the traffic lights were functioning, and public transportation had also ground to a halt. This of course meant aircraft in addition to things like subways, triggering delays and cancellations at airports. The Lisbon airport continued to feel the impacts until Wednesday—two days later. Travelers were stuck at airports, and cargo that was in flight went missing due to the outage. The people who rely on the lifesaving medications in those shipments must have been in grave danger.
Long lines formed at gas stations that could still supply gas. People who made it home couldn’t open their garage doors and were forced to park on the street. Supermarkets that were still open were apparently mobbed with people, their shelves cleaned out of essentials like it was the pandemic all over again.
As the day went on, it became clear that the outage had affected the internet in addition to the phone networks. Millions of people were unable to reach out to their loved ones or get any detailed information on the situation. According to later news reports, people couldn’t even access the 112 emergency line (like our 110 in Japan or 911 in North America), forcing people in crisis to have to flag down a local police officer to call an ambulance on their radios. It must have been terrifying.
Some areas also experienced a break in their water service.
We were able to contact our children just in time and go pick them up at school. We normally burn candles, so we had a bunch of them stocked up. We also have walkie-talkies. Still, we don’t have a radio, so we went to the next-door neighbor’s house to get information from him. We heard about the water outages, so everybody started filling up pots and buckets with water, getting their washing done, and soaking their plants. The problem was that we hadn’t gone food shopping in some time, so our food reserves were low. Luckily, there is a place in our neighborhood that bakes bread over a fire, and they have always taken cash. In terms of physical cash on hand, our son is the richest one in our family—so I took a few bills from his stash and quickly asked my husband and daughter to go buy us two days’ worth of bread. I finished up the pasta I had been making and combined it with some of the freshly baked bread to serve everyone a late lunch. When they finished eating, some of the neighborhood kids came by to invite my son and daughter to go get ice cream at the café (talk was that they were giving away ice cream for free in Lisbon).
My daughter obviously couldn’t watch videos on her tablet, and my son couldn’t play his computer games. So the family decided to play some board games at home.
My biggest worry with the power outage was the refrigerator and freezer. If the power stayed down for several days, cleaning them out would be an absolute nightmare. Humans are nothing if not creatures of habit, so when dinnertime came, I mindlessly opened the refrigerator to look inside. My daughter even put a note on the door saying DO NOT OPEN, but at one point, I looked over and there was my husband—with a mug filled with beer.
“If you were going to open the refrigerator to get a beer, why didn’t you get anything out for the rest of us!?” I snapped. Later that night, when the family had all gathered around the table again and was into their Monopoly game, he saw me sitting there with my glass of white wine and got me back. “Did you just open the fridge to refill your wine?!” I had actually put a big ice cube in my glass and poured the wine over it to chill it, but I guess in my house, we learned that running out of alcohol is more of a crisis than the power going out.
We heard that the power was restored in Lisbon around nine-thirty at night. The light lingers until about nine p.m. this time of year in Portugal, so the lights probably came on just around the time that people were debating whether to light candles. My family was still playing our game. I figured that we would take advantage of the opportunity to tuck in early, but surprisingly, we ended up staying up later than usual. Of course, we figured that school would be closed the next day so we kept playing our game—and then at about half-past midnight, the lights in the room suddenly popped back on. But before we could celebrate, my kids let out a groan realizing they would have school the next day.
We all agreed to head outside at sunset to see what the world looked like without electricity, but we were so absorbed in our game that we completely forgot. Of course, we never imagined that the power would be restored so quickly. We regretted it somewhat, but the fact that we could see the greenish-yellow glow of fireflies through the window all night was a testament to the total darkness that must have been outside.
It was an inconvenience to be without power and communications, but for someone who was born before the 1990s, it was also a precious time that allowed me to experience the family life I had always envisioned. We put our heads together, worked as a team, and moved as a single unit. It deepened our relationships—made us kinder, and helped us get to know each other better. The experience convinced me that if we stuck together, we could get through anything. I truly felt that those few hours forged several years’ worth of bonding between us.
For me, the April 28 blackout was a day of unmatched happiness.
