Boozy Brits in Spanish holiday hotspots showed ‘bulldog spirit' & kept on drinking through massive blackout
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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Ex-pat Charlie Robb with his dog Brandy drinking beer at the Little White Bull in Benidorm yesterday
Credit: Nick Parker
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Charlie rushed to the bar as soon as it re-opened following Spain's power outage
Credit: Nick Parker
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Charlie raises a glass to Spanish technicians
Credit: Nick Parker
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
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.
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Read more on blackout
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.'
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Exclusive
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.
People cheer with excitement as lights turn on in Madrid
'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.
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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
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.
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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
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.
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In Valencia, a 46-year-old woman died after her oxygen machine failed and she was deprived of the life-sustaining supply.
I
n
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
Initial estimates have placed the cost of the collapse at an eye-watering 4.5 billion euros.
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A worker assists a customer with a torch at a supermarket during a power outage which hit large parts of Spain
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Food stands in Barcelona during the blackout
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SUNDAY, SEPT 2 9.04am (Japan time): World War Two formally ends when Japanese officials sign the surrender treaty aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Additional reporting: Eleanor Sprawson 9 US President Harry Truman approved the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 Credit: Getty Advertisement 9 Six days later on August 15 Japan's Emperor Hirohito announced his country's unconditional surrender Credit: PA:Press Association
