Lanzarote and the Canaries did not experience the massive power outage that affected huge areas of mainland Spain, Portugal and southern France yesterday, but the islands suffered knock-on effects and inconvenience.
The outage started at 12.30 pm (11.30 Canarian time) and affected most Spanish provinces, leaving people stranded in trains, stuck in traffic and waiting in airports. There were over 200 callouts to rescue people from lifts.
The island groups of the Canaries and the Balearics have entirely separate electricity systems and were not affected. However, several knock-on effects of the mainland’s power cuts were experienced, such as failures of the internet, websites, ATMs and credit card payment systems. A number of flights between mainland Spain and Lanzarote were also cancelled or delayed.
Yesterday afternoon emergency services requested that Canarians restrict mobile phone use in order to reduce congestion and keep 112 emergency services operative. The emergency lines do not appear to have been affected at any time, although the Canarian Government’s 012 information line was briefly out of service.
On Tuesday morning, the Spanish government claimed that power had been restored to 99.95% of the country,
The reason for the cuts is not yet certain. The Portuguese grid operator has claimed it was due to extreme temperature variations; however, the Spanish government has not ruled out any cause, including a potential cyberattack or physical sabotage.
More fake news
Birmingham Live has been at it again, with a completely false report about power cuts and panic-buying on the Canaries.
The local news site owned by Reach plc has published an article headlined “Lanzarote and Tenerife issue warning to UK tourists and says (sic) “people are starting to panic.”
To be quite clear: there has been no warning to UK tourists, there have been no power cuts on the Canary Islands and there are no confirmed reports of panic buying on the islands.
The Canarian Government issued an alert yesterday to “ensure monitoring of possible impacts on basic supplies” that may be caused by the power outage on the mainland. However, this is a precautionary measure.
While Spanish and Canarian authorities occasionally issue general warnings to the population, they never do so to British tourists. That would be the job of the British Foreign Office.
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