BOOZY Brits were getting the beers in yesterday as the bars of Benidorm reopened after Spain’s blackout chaos.
Ex-pat Charlie Robb was one of the first to clock in at his local, The Little White Bull pub in the heart of the Spanish holiday playground yesterday.
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Retired oil rig worker Charlie, 70, raised a glass to Spanish technicians who restored power and treated his pet Border Collie Brandy to a sip of his ice cold lager.
Electric pumps at thousands of bars across the brash Costa Blanca resort stopped working, credit card machines shut and lager warmed during a 13-hour outage.
But bulldog Brits told yesterday how they rallied round and tackled the emergency by paying with cash and switching to bottled beer served from coolboxes.
And they were all smiles yesterday as tens of thousands of trippers flooded back to pubs and bars as normal service was resumed.
Charlie, from Glasgow, said: “The power went off at around 11.30am yesterday but I was among about 30 Brits who managed to carry on boozing until it got dark.
“I’m quite lucky because I normally drink bottled Spanish Mahou beer which the staff managed to keep quite cool then I switched to bottled Desperado beer with a shot of tequila.
“We showed true bulldog spirit and only have up when it got so dark indoors we couldn’t see what we were drinking.
“But the power came back on at 12.30am and everything’s back to normal in Benidorm today and I’m back on the beer.”
Little White Bull landlady Mairead Roberts, 32, who moved to Spain from Rotherham said: “We managed to stay open till about 8pm on Monday until it got too dark.
“We’ve run our family pub here for even years and thought Covid was weird but this was something else.
“The cellphone network still didn’t come back on till this morning but we’re up and running now, and it’s great to be back in business.”
The blackouts across the Iberian peninsula could have also been caused by failures at solar farms, Spain’s grid operator said last night.
Spain’s national REE said two incidents of power generation loss had been identified, likely from solar plants.
The incidents – which caused instability which could have triggered the breakdown of its connection with France – came as a cyber attack was ruled out as the cause.
Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez said that the blackout was not due to a lack of nuclear power, which far-right party Vox wants to stop his government phasing out.
A drive towards solar and wind energy – similar to the push ordered by UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband – is believed to have made Spain’s power grid less resilient.
Mr Sanchez said about 15 gigawatts of electricity – more than half of the power being consumed at the time – “suddenly disappeared” in five seconds.
Power was still not fully restored yesterday amid continuing engineering work.
At least five people are known to have lost their lives to various tragedies in the 24 hours since Spain, Portugal and southern France were plunged into blackout.
A family of three – two parents and a child – perished in Taboadela, north-west Spain, after they inhaled carbon monoxide, presumed from a damaged generator.
In Valencia, a 46-year-old woman died after her oxygen machine failed and she was deprived of the life-sustaining supply.
In Madrid, a woman was killed in a fire that police believe could have been caused by a candle.
The sad news comes as Spain’s top court launches a bombshell probe into whether sabotage was behind the sudden power loss – and it is revealed that “unusual activity” hit the UK grid hours before Europe.
Initial estimates have placed the cost of the collapse at an eye-watering 4.5 billion euros.
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