MADRID (AP) — The blackout that paralyzed the Iberian Peninsula for most of Monday had an especially fierce impact on high-speed trains that run across Spain.
Here are accounts from three affected passengers:
Trapped in a tunnel
Álvaro Agustín had spent the weekend in Gijón, his hometown, and was traveling back to Valencia, where he works as a doctor.
Sometime after departing the northern Spanish city, his train entered a tunnel — and came to a halt. Agustín, 26, assumed it would be a brief delay, as is sometimes the case on this six-hour journey he knows well. He waited, then waited more. Two hours passed without any news.
Finally, train staff informed passengers of a power supply problem and said they didn’t know when it would be resolved. An hour later, an emergency unit of soldiers arrived to distribute water and share the news of a blackout across Spain and Portugal. They, too, said they had no idea when power would be restored.
Eventually, the bathroom’s toilet clogged, its odor seeping out into the car and forcing passengers to hold their shirts over their noses. Then the train’s emergency batteries ran out, plunging Agustín’s car into darkness. There wasn’t even the light from cell phone screens, as people sought to conserve their precious power.
“Outside, even though they didn’t have internet, they were in the sun, while we were in the dark without knowing what was happening,” Agustín said on Tuesday, after returning home to Gijón in the early hours of the morning.
Most passengers remained calm. Some even laughed and started singing to pass the time. But a 15-year-old girl in his car began suffering an anxiety attack. Agustín removed his stethoscope to examine her. Then he talked to her, giving her advice to help her control her breathing and calmed her down.
Nine hours after Agustín’s train stopped, an auxiliary locomotive arrived to passengers’ rescue, and took them to the nearest city.
Waiting in Barcelona
When Paquita González, 53, arrived Monday at Barcelona’s main train station, service had already been suspended. Hoping the disruption would be brief, she stayed put, expecting to catch another train to her home in Cadiz, in the south of the country.
Hours later, and nothing had changed. González lay on the terminal’s floor through the night, but was too stressed and nervous to doze off.
“The night was very hard, I’m old,” she said the next morning. “There were small children, all trying to sleep on the bare floor.”
As of noon on Tuesday, she was exhausted and still waiting for a spot on a train — alongside hundreds of other frustrated travelers trying to reach their destinations.
“Another day waiting,” González said through a rush of tears. “I’ve been here for more than 15 hours.”
Card games and solidarity
Erika Sánchez was on her way to Madrid on a high-speed train from Barcelona when her partner messaged her around 12:30 p.m. about “something strange” at work: colleagues all over Spain were losing power.
Shortly afterwards, her train stopped “in the middle of nowhere” — forest all around, but no town in sight, she said.
The conductor announced that he would open the doors to let air circulate and that he was going to conserve battery power by turning off the train.
Several hours went by. Sánchez played cards with her seat neighbors and chatted with elderly women, who said the situation reminded them of the difficult times they endured in their youth. Others shared power banks and what little food they had around with the group.
“The people working on the train did a pretty good job and tried to distribute food and water to everyone,” she added.
Six hours later, the train began moving and the passengers cheered. They arrived at a station in Guadalajara, 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Madrid, where another train had also been diverted. Inside a nearby gymnasium, volunteers provided food for some of the 800 passengers, many of whom prepared to spend the night on the floor.
Sánchez prepared to do the same, until a young woman offered to drive her to Madrid. At 3 a.m., she arrived home, 12 hours later than anticipated.
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Associated Press photographer Emilio Morenatti in Barcelona contributed to this report.
