Blackout And Prep
Sun, 04 May 2025
If you missed the news, this past Monday, April 28th, there was a massive blackout that affected the entirety of Portugal and Spain. Which meant, as a person living in Portugal, I had no power for roughly twelve hours between 11:30 and 23:30.
There’s not too much to say about the experience itself. Other than being an abnormally large blackout and being unable to work during the day, my life was otherwise largely unaffected. Sure, it was a little hot and uncomfortable, and the blackout did also bring a water outage, but due to the short duration I didn’t have to face any real challenges.
Speaking of, I am extremely thankful to the group of extremely smart and capable engineers who were no doubt working their asses off trying to restore power! Especially impressive if you’ve ever heard about the difficulties of a black start.
What I would like to write a little bit about is preparedness. If you did follow the news at all you would have also seen that there was a rush for supplies, specifically water and fuel. In the early hours there was conflicting information going around. You had the Prime Minister saying that the blackout would be resolved within the day, immediately followed by a spokesperson for REN saying it could take up to a week. That kind of contrast is going to get people a little panicked.
Luckily, we didn’t need to rush out. A couple of years ago my housemate and I noticed that we were suffering from small-ish, let’s say under three hours, blackouts and water outages at least twice a year. It sucks to be suddenly surprised with a lack of water, and lead us to start keeping a small stockpile. Super handy.
So much so that when in March the EU Crisis Management commissioner recommended that people should have enough supplies to be self-sufficient for three days, we decided to expand! We’re actually looking at the Switzerland's recommendation of seven day self-sufficiency, and even though we’re not there yet it's already come in handy.
First up, getting the news. Since the blackout was so large it knocked out all the phone networks. This mean in addition to no internet, we had no cell communication at all. I recently picked up a portable radio, annoyingly we hadn’t charged it yet, but it’s actually possible to hand crank this one! Handy! Alternatively, we could have used one of the power banks we keep charged for emergencies. Would this have gotten us through a week? No, but it’s obviously pretty helpful for getting information.
For lunch that day we had planned to slow cook a chicken. That was obviously out of the window, but canned foods meant sandwiches were easy enough to make, and importantly meant we could leave the fridge and freezer closed to keep everything in there cool.
As the night came in we had torches and candles ready to go. Honestly, this was the most painful part of the day. The torches were way too bright and concentrated, while the candles were far too dark, and it did make moving around in the evening a pain. This would be something I would want to work on!
It had me considering what the situation would be like if we had to go for more than a day. We would have been reasonably comfortable for a couple of days, but what about beyond that? What if it had taken a week to get everything working? It can feel kind of silly to start prepping like this, when I bring it up to people they have this sort of “Oh, you’re like a doom prepper” vibe, which yeah I get. I still wear an N95 mask out regularly, but this kind of prep has obvious value.
I would recommend that if you’re not already, you start preparing something small, and build it up bit by bit. If it never gets used, fantastic, and if you ever find yourself in a situation where you do need a go bag of sorts, you’ll be glad you had it ready!