Massive power outage in Europe! What happened?

NBC's Rory O'Neill reports that this is still a mystery as to what caused the outage, but a cyberattack has been ruled out

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Six forty five. It's Mike Elliott, Columbus This Morning News.
A crazy situation in europe An unprecedented blackout brought much
of Spain and Portugal to a standstill. Thousands of people
stranded on trains, millions without power, phone internet coverage, cannot
get to ATMs to get money out. Spain's Prime Minister
Pedro Sanchez called it a total collapse of the system.

(00:23):
Here with more NBC News Radios. Rory O'Neil on the
Legacy Retirement Group dot com phone line, Rory, what happened yesterday?

Speaker 2 (00:31):
We don't know. You know, We've just got a statement
a short time ago saying they pretty much ruled out
this idea of a cyber attack, but exactly what caused
this cascading failure is still they're not quite sure. They
pinpointed it geographically to the area between France and Spain,
but for most everyone on the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and

(00:53):
Portugal and big parts of France, they had no power
for about ten hours yesterday and they are still playing ketchup,
of course, for travel as people are trying to get
back on planes and train schedules, but everything from surgeries
to haircuts even there was the BBC had a funny
story about one guy was in the middle of a
buzz cut and whip off.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Well that's the worst that happened. That they were okay,
but I can't imagine being you know, at a hospitals
affected by this, emergency services affected by.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
This, Yes they were, so the hospitals do have backup generators,
but anything that was scheduled, like a knee replacement or hippolio,
that all got delayed in postponed so they could provide
some emergency services. People sadly stuck in elevators for hours
on stop trains between stops for ten, twelve, fourteen hours
in some instances, and sadly it appears there was a

(01:48):
fire in Madrid, apparently started by a woman using a candle.
She was killed, thirteen others injured. So yeah, just a
terrible scene all around, and it's going to take a
couple of days to recover.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Well yeah, which with no Internet, people are starving for
information and where do you typically go when you want
to find something? As you grab your phone and try
to figure out what's going on, and you're trying to
contact people and you just you can't I mean it,
panic would set it.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
And you have no cash, so now you can't tap
you all your credit cards are out and the cards
are out, So now you know, if you don't have
any cash, what do you do?

Speaker 1 (02:22):
And they don't know what happened. They still don't know
if this was just a random outage or if this
was something more nefarious.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, they don't. They pretty much ruled out a cyber attack.
That's the only thing we've said so far, so far.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
And it begs the question, Rory, I'll let you go.
But you know, could that happen in the United States?
And we hear about the stresses of the power grid,
especially in the summer when everyone's got the air conditioning going,
And you know, if that happened here, what do we do.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Oh look, Texas had that freeze a couple of years
ago with their power grid, remember the frozen mills, And yeah,
so yeah, no, we are certainly vulnerable as well, and
we are not about problems like this