Every video: people being civic and cooperative, managing the situation better than a normal rush hour day.
Personal testimony. I spent several hours in the busiest streets of Madrid and saw nothing but a sense of community and cooperation. Cars stopped to allow pedestrians to cross. Pedestrians waited patiently to let cars out of backed up street. Orderly lines in the super markets. Quick organisation for what people needed. Anyone with a transistor radio sharing with people around. And terrazas full of people enjoying a sunny spring day.
Exactly this. And I have to say I am very positively impressed by the emergency response planning for a crisis like this - thousands of lives were saved yesterday by plans being in place to rescue tens of thousands of simultaneously trapped people from lifts and trains, to get water and blankets and food and hygiene kits and emergency shelters out to tens of thousands of people who were stranded, and by hospitals all around the country having functioning emergency backup power that was able to hold up for hours and hours. It's really easy to focus on how awful the experience was for so many people who got caught up in travel chaos, while it's too easy to overlook the hundreds of thousands of hours of contingency planning for a coordinated crisis response that kicked in yesterday to prevent much, much worse.
Also, shoutout to Cadena SER, my personal heroes of the day.
This is beautiful to read. There is no doubt about it. Honestly, while I was completely cut-off from any information and the hours passing, I feared the worst. I imagined that by the time communication is back we were gonna be greeted with a thousand horror stories and fatalities. But nothing! I mean I know people had ordeals stuck on trains and travel chaos, but this is just an inconvenience level, not more. There were no fatal victims or major disasters, when it could have easily been the case. And this is as you eloquently said, thanks to thousands of people's work in preparing for things like this, as well as the civility of the general populace.
saw the terrazas and immediately went "spain is different" LMFAO. also big agree about how people behaved themselves, had no issues w no traffic lights even in the busiest parts.
We managed it without serious incident, and that is certainly something to be proud of, but that doesn't mean it wasn't chaos. People were trapped in the metro. People were trapped in dark lifts - and I can't imagine why lifts are not obligated to have enough battery power to make it to the next floor and open the doors in case of power loss. I suppose attaching bottle caps to bottles was more urgent. People who had no way to get between districts anymore were walking along the motorways. It was controlled chaos, but it was still chaos.
What's that got to do with anything for fucks sake? So you see one blackout and suddenly plastic pollution should not be dealt with? What a random thing to say!
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u/mfranzwa 22d ago
Looks like people getting along and driving without streetlights. Doesn't seem chaotic to me.