A few days ago, major portions of Spain and Portugal went dark. Without warning, millions found themselves without power. As reported by Reuters, the widespread outage affected critical infrastructure across both nations, with the cause still under investigation.
This wasn't a localized failure or a minor inconvenience. This was a massive disruption affecting two European nations simultaneously.
What makes this event particularly significant isn't just its scale, but what it reveals about our approach to resilience. As officials worked to restore services and urged citizens to remain calm, a strange paradox revealed itself – one I've been wrestling with since speaking at a European Urban Initiative conference last week: Why do we demand 72-hour resilience from individual citizens but not from the systems they inhabit?
The Spain-Portugal outage wasn't specifically predicted. No one had anticipated that two entire countries would lose significant portions of their power grid in a single event. Yet it exposed the kind of systemic vulnerability that emergency planners have long warned about – vulnerabilities that are rarely addressed in how we design our communities and infrastructure.