A blackout in a foreign city made me realise I'd be utterly unprepared for a national emergency

Lise Hand

I LANDED IN Porto airport on 28 April last year in great form, with five days solo exploring a new city and working remotely on a sunny balcony stretching ahead of me, to be followed by a six-day frolic in the Algarve.

Fabulous.

The fact that the escalators down to the airport’s metro line were unmoving was a minor inconvenience.

But then, outside the station entrance, a woman in a hi-viz jacket apologetically explained that the trains weren’t moving either, and nobody had a clue when they would be back up and running.

“Big power cut,” she explained.

“In all of Porto?” I asked.

She shook her head. “In all of Portugal and Spain.”

Just fabulous altogether. With exquisite timing, the flight from Dublin had touched down mere minutes after the Big Iberian Blackout had wiped out business as usual across the entire peninsula.

No electricity, no phone signal. Mile-long queues formed for buses into the centre. People crammed on, the younger travellers staring dumbly at no-longer-smart phones now rendered as useful as a swing door on a submarine.

Then I was decanted into the centre of a completely unfamiliar city.

Plunged into the void

The directions and address of the rental apartment? Yep, stored on Google Maps on an unreachable cloud.

All around, shops, cafés and restaurants were rolling down shutters. Fridges were offline, pay machines useless. ATMs were banjaxed.

After a bit of aimless wandering about, I located a five-star hotel, reckoning it would have its own generator, and wheedled a few minutes’ Wi-Fi from a sympathetic receptionist.

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Phoned home to offer proof of life, then found a message from the apartment rental office.

“Sorry but the electronic pads to access door keys are offline. Please check back later.”

Even more fabulous. Nor were hotels taking new bookings. Systems down etc.

Tl;dr: as night fell, the last city centre hotel on a hastily-assembled list jotted down on a paper map came up roses; a robust generator was powering its check-in system, its lights and most importantly, the beer fridges in the bar. Just before midnight and just after three chilled cervezas, the city’s power blazed back on. Cheers, rejoicing, herds of optimists stampeding out in search of food.

The following morning in Porto, everything was weirdly back to normal, as if the whole schemozzle had been some sort of collective fever-dream, best quickly forgotten.

It hadn’t been at all scary, just slightly stressful. It had been a huge malfunction rather than anything sinister, and if one is going to be in a bit of a fix somewhere, then among the laid-back and friendly Portuguese is the ideal location. Moreover, it hadn’t gone into a second day, when the situation may have started to look less of a novelty.

Nonetheless, it had been thoroughly unsettling to experience what happens when both telecommunications and power abruptly disappear in tandem.

A taste of crisis

It was sobering how every single aspect of daily life and commerce was instantly disrupted, and how the inability to contact people or to instantly connect to social media or a news website for updates and accurate information massively exacerbated the confusion. Was it a system snafu or was it terrorism?

How long would it last – hours, days, weeks?

The rest of the trip was, well, fabulous. But the unsettled feeling lingered.

Back home, an inventory of emergency supplies was the first order of business. It was pathetic, to be honest.

I’d be the first to succumb to the zombie apocalypse.

No wind-up radio, no torches. Loads of batteries, most of them used. Candles? Enough dinky tea-lights to illuminate Notre Dame Cathedral, but they’d be bugger-all practical use in a crisis. And as for medical supplies… a sad stock of out-of-date Covid tests, antiseptic creams and cough bottles. Though if there was a need to patch up bullet-wounds, I’d be sorted for small round plasters.

At least, unlike some even less organised citizens, Joe Jacobs’ iodine tablets had been evicted from their biscuit-tin a while back. These mementos of a Government Emergency Wheeze were the anti-radiation pills which landed through every Irish household’s letterbox in June 2002 – a leisurely eight months after the events of 9/11 sparked fears of a copycat attack on the Sellafield nuclear plant across the Irish Sea which could result in radiation engulfing our east coast.

Shortly after the New York devastation, Junior Minister Joe Jacob sallied forth onto Radio One’s Marian Finucane Show to quell the nation’s “alarmistic vibrations” by assuring everyone that the government had a cunning plan which involved an emergency booklet and a box of radiation-busting iodine pills. The resulting interview became the stuff of legend, a jaw-dropping car-crash that was as hilarious as it was hair-raising.

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But by and large, Ireland has been free of the sort of existential alarmist vibrations which constantly beset many other EU member states, especially those saddled with the neighbour-from-hell that is Russia. The threat from 70-year old Sellafield has diminished as the plant continues its decommissioning process. The deadly violence which ravaged the North, and which for some precarious time in the 1970s seriously threatened the security and stability of the Republic, has mercifully abated.

It’s not that we’re immune to headless chicken outbreaks when a threat looms, such as the giddy panic-buying of sliced pans before Storm Ophelia landed in October 2017 way back when nationwide Status Red warnings were unprecedented, and the frenzied supermarket melees over toilet paper when the Covid lockdown was announced in March 2020.

Overall however our national concerns are chiefly those shared by other prosperous countries; a critical shortage of housing, lack of access to healthcare, a rising cost of living, and in our case how to keep the multinational gravy-train on track. At present, the government has the wherewithal to throw fistfuls of money at fiscal challenges, as it signing off on a 10.75% public pay increase agreement can attest.

But since the various shocks caused by Brexit, by Donald Trump’s foreign policies (wars, tariffs and general mayhem) and by the pandemic, the added security blanket of being at a slight remove from danger as an island nation has rapidly eroded.

Global affairs arrive to Ireland

If anything, the fact that 75% of all transatlantic cables go through, or close to, Ireland, makes the country an obvious target for hostile entities, and the potential for sudden and deliberate disruption is more difficult to ignore now.

Around the world, governments are increasingly advising their citizens to have provisions such as cash, tinned goods and water in the case of an emergency such as war, extreme weather and cybersecurity threats – including Taoiseach Micheál Martin who issued similar warnings on the Late Late Show last week in the wake of the bomb hoaxes which caused the evacuation of RTÉ and other media organisations on Friday.

Perhaps this was the event which may have served to concentrate minds – after all, the national broadcaster presumably would be everyone’s go-to for information and news, should some class of serious brown stuff hit the country’s fan.

Granted, they rose to the occasion – “Up yours, whoever you are,” barked an indignant David McCullagh when his show belatedly started – but one may only devoutly hope that literally dusting off the Roadcaster isn’t RTÉ management’s actual Plan B in the event the station is knocked off-air in a national emergency.

And if any more reminders are needed that some class of malicious disruption is no longer a remote or abstract possibility, the fact that the arrival of every European head for two days of meetings has prompted an unprecedented lockdown of the capital should do the trick. Dublin city – and the seas and skies in its vicinity – are awash with no-go zones, restrictions, closures, barricades and happy gardaí on overtime.

With luck, all the political poobahs will depart unscathed. But while the lights are still on, it might be time to have a rummage in the supplies drawer and fish out the copy of the Be Emergency Ready booklet which every household should have (but every household apparently hasn’t) received in the past few weeks. Planning isn’t panicking.

Oh, and chuck out Joe’s iodine tablets. God knows, those yokes would probably give you a dose of the auld radiation by now.

Lise Hand is a journalist and writer. This column runs every Wednesday.