Everyone knows what they were doing when the power went out this Monday. A day later, normality has been recovering in the city, despite some traffic lights still resisting and queues accumulating at gas stations. Not to mention all those who couldn't return home and spent the night as best they could at Sants station and the sports centers set up by the City Council.
Although it took longer for some, electricity gradually returned to homes and shops, with communication problems that lasted throughout the day. By mid-morning on Tuesday, the electricity supply has been practically restored throughout the city, according to the City Council. Water supply is not yet guaranteed in the mountain neighborhoods, especially in Collserola, due to pumping problems, and Aigües de Barcelona is working to resolve it.
Uncertainty was the main protagonist of a day that saw everything, with scenes more typical of fiction series than of any given Monday. First, those who were trapped in elevators without being able to notify anyone. In the Catalan capital, firefighters have attended to some 800 incidents, of which a hundred were related to rescues in elevators and almost 300 to assistance for people with reduced mobility. They also had to act on trains and the metro, evacuating users along the tracks with a final destination to ghost stations.
The streets soon filled with people walking everywhere, asking for directions to places they entrusted to Google Maps, and tourists who didn't know how to get back to their hotels. The metro service was one of the main affected of the day, filling buses to capacity to return home, with TMB putting up to 900 buses into operation. Metro lines 1 and 5 were the first to start recovering, until all were operational at 3 in the morning, with convoys providing service throughout the night to ensure everyone could return home. It has taken longer to recover service in Rodalies, still affected, and Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC), completely recovered.
To all this, those queues returned to the supermarkets that recalled the pandemic shortages, even gas stations started selling ice cream for 1 euro and there were those who started asking for a turn in some shops that had not yet run out of transistors, batteries and flashlights. Not to mention those who started playing cards on benches or those who filled the terraces, deciding to spend the hours, come what may, having some beers.