EXTRAORDINARY TIMES: How Zero Day unravelled on the Costa del Sol as cash is king and the supermarkets all shut their doors.

By Jon Clarke in San Pedro Alcantara

It was around 12.30pm. The first sign of something strange was the giant wind turbines on the road between Gaucin and Manilva on the Costa del Sol standing totally still.

It came despite the strong Poniente wind blowing a hoolie and buffeting the car. But they just didn’t move. 

And then there was the most bizarre gust of wind, and the car literally rocked. The Rest is Politics podcast on Spotify cut off and when I tried to call my wife on WhatsApp it just wouldn’t connect.

Next I noticed the phone had changed to ‘SOS’ only with a strange symbol next to it.

I couldn’t have guessed at this point it was becoming like Robert De Niro’s gripping new Netflix White House drama Zero Day where terrorists paralyzed the power grid in the US leading to widespread chaos, including multiple plane crashes.

By the time I got onto the main N-340 motorway at Manilva, cars were driving slowly in parallel lines and all the tunnels had dropped the speed limit to 60… then my wife called to ask if I’d heard about the Spain-wide power cut, ‘what was going on?’ 

She had neither electricity nor water in Marbella. Could I find out? When was I coming home? She sounded worried. Then she cut off.

Next, I had a call from Valencia from our sales rep there telling me all the power was out in the city, and finally I spoke to our digital editor, Walt, who is based in La Linea.

He told me he had no power either but had somehow got a post up and was trying to get reports up on social media ‘when the reception comes back from time to time’.

He said Gibraltar was fine and he might head across to do more reporting. But, understandably, he didn’t know if the border would be open. It was.

Meanwhile, our news editor, Dilip, had sensibly left the office to drive home and finally phoned to say he’d got there and would try and work with his mobile phone hot spot.

I was enroute to an event, Chefs for Children, with 150 kids and 44 of Spain’s top chefs in Benahavis. A special event, it seemed vital to support it, and I decided to head that way regardless, only to find the mother of all traffic jams as I passed Estepona.

Eventually, I got off the motorway and arrived via a back route I knew (forget using Google Maps, it was dead as a dodo).

The first thing I noticed was the kitchen full of food for the evening’s glitzy gala – all in the dark, piles of food loaded up. 

The reception of the five star Anantana Padierna spa hotel had light, but as a receptionist told me, nobody could check out and pay as credit cards were not working, and the downstairs car park barriers were not working so if you had a car you ‘can’t get out’.

The event went well, as it happened, but the mayor of Benahavis and one of Malaga’s leading politicians, Manuel Cardena, told me they were ‘very concerned’ and, quite rightly, baffled.

The deputy mayor, British expat Scott Marshall, told me they ‘were not ruling anything out’, but they were all talking about the Russians or Chinese being to blame.

Suddenly as if on orders from above, they all left together for who knows where.

The evening’s presenter, Fermando Ramos, a well known Spanish TV presenter, told me he was ‘very worried’ and said it was putting the whole evening in danger. 

Organiser, Pilar Candil, said at least all the chefs – including a number of Spain’s most famous three-star celebrities – were there in situ… ‘they have the food to prepare IF we get power and at least there is lots of good wine, care of Emilio Moro’.

There was plenty of tension in the air though, and all the parents were trying to use their phones… and predictably the only conversation was about terrorism and the Russians.

As a journalist, they were all asking me what I knew (which was little) and as soon as the day’s event ended I hot footed it to San Pedro, where the Olive Press office is based, to see what was going on.

And, of course, there was nobody there – the Marie Celeste of local newspapers, everyone out, gone. Many at least to do some reporting.

But it was pitch black, so hanging around there made no sense.

I got home and discovered my teenage son at home. “Everyone just left school,” he told me. “Loads of parents turned up and it was a sort of stampede. All the kids went home.”

All the national radio stations were out, including Radio Classica, Radio 5, Radio 3. All we could listen to was the few people in the studio in Madrid on Radio 1 who occasionally got a call in from a reporter, perhaps on a satellite phone.

Incredibly, RAÍ Andalucia was also working.

Nobody really knew what was going on but they started to talk to people stuck in trains, and then the discussion turned to people ‘stuck in lifts’.

I decided to go out to investigate and found firstly the local health centre closing at 2pm as there was no power. “We have no generator,” a nurse told me. “If it’s an emergency we can take you into A&E but it will all be dealt with manually.

“Anything really urgent you’ll need to go to La Linea or Costa del Sol hospital.”

Nearby, the pharmacy was shutting. The owner, Victor Navarro, was trying to close the shutters but couldn’t do it without power. “We’ve been trying to give people urgent medicines in cash but it’s hard to monitor it without a register,” he told me.

Around the corner, the Dia supermarket was closed and a dozen staff sat around outside on a wall not knowing what to do … “nobody’s told us anything, but the tills and everything is out,” said one.

It was the same situation at nearby Carrefour. But at least a helpful member of staff pointed us towards Mercadona. “The one up by the roundabout is open but there are apparently very big queues.”

Not when we got there however, with angry customers, who had apparently queued to get in for ages, suddenly saw the lights go out as the generator’s fuel ran out. They had been left, literally in the dark with no chance of checking out.

There were long rows of full trolleys just left by check out.

Across the road we found what was probably the only shop working – the BP petrol station. But it was ‘cash-only’ and there was a queue of over 100 cars jostling to get in. 

So many punters had headed here that the local police had four agents guiding traffic at nearby strategic points to avoid a total collapse.

I had 10 euros in my pocket so bought some Gazpacho, Doritos, chocolate and ice to keep the milk cool in the fridge back home.

“It’s the busiest we’ve ever been,” said the manager. “Extraordinary. I didn’t know so many people still had so much cash.”

As I got home at 5pm I was told the Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, was about to speak as rumours swirled on the radio about some strange ‘adverse atmospheric phenomenon’ and so I waited for an entire hour in the car to hear him.

He finally told us pretty much diddly squat: “We are discounting nothing. We are just trying to get the power back on.”

It was time to go to the beach!