I Had No Plan B… and This Is What Happened

The cheers welled up, distant at first.

Then louder. Louder.

Louder still…

Until a rapturous cacophony exploded on the street below my Lisbon apartment. You’d have thought Portugal had just won soccer’s World Cup.

Only… this victory was much sweeter.

The lights were back on!

And the entire city, my open French door told me, was celebrating.

Pretty sure you probably know this, but the Iberian Peninsula was thrust back 200 years last week, when the entire power grid collapsed. Not a lick of ‘lectricity to be sparked in all of Spain, all of Portugal, and parts of some other countries.

Think about that: Entire countries without power.

No modern conveniences or safety measures. No phones, no lights, no computers. No TVs. No traffic signals. Elevators, escalators—off. Airports, train stations, subway lines—lifeless. Electronic barcode readers and cash registers silenced, meaning no supermarket access. Restaurants closed, with no way to prepare meals.

Apparently, the outage stemmed from a “very large oscillation in electrical voltage, first in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese system.”

No clue what any of that means.

Sounds like someone plugged a hairdryer into the wrong socket just as someone else turned on the washing machine.

But here’s the more important part of this story…

The world is royally screwed if ever we do happen up a moment when an entire country’s grid (or entire countries’ grids) is down for longer than nine or 10 hours.

In the early hours of Portugal’s Day of Darkness, life was pretty much normal. Al fresco diners lounged at tables at the Palestinian café just outside my apartment, eating fire-grilled lamb and drinking rose lemonade. The ladies running the fresh fruit market nearby were still selling tomatoes and peppers since it’s largely a cash business.

The road crew redoing the street and sidewalk were busy as always, jackhammering this and that.

And then, life started to devolve at the margins.

Traffic grew increasingly heinous because drivers clearly have no idea how to navigate major intersections without the red-light/green-light game giving them visual clues. Accidents mounted.

As sunset approached, the hunger struck. Portugal is a country where kitchens are small, and so are refrigerators (and when refrigerators are out all day, that’s a problem). Many Portuguese people shop for just a day or two’s worth of victuals. So, packs of people began roaming the streets, hunting for any supermarket, mini-market, or bodega that might be open and still stocked with food.

Most major chains had closed. Some had guards watching over the front doors to disabuse anyone of any thoughts that might lean toward looting. My wife Yulia and I went out for a stroll, to maybe find some bread. We came across a Continente supermarket that was allowing one person in at a time.

The line to enter stretched down the block.

We kept walking.

Gas stations were closed, and because I was lazy that morning and didn’t want to pull in for a fill-up on the way home from dropping the kid off at school, my car had enough fuel to drive less than 40 miles.

ATMs were dark. Credit and debit card machines were, as my grandfather use to say, “useless as teats on a boar hog.”

Cell towers were in and (mainly) out. At one point, my Twitter/X app flashed to life for a few minutes, and it was enough time to read some headline announcing that Portuguese officials were worried that restoring power could take a week or longer.

Really not what you want to read.

And all through the day I kept thinking to myself: El Jefe, you’re an idiot! You always write about building a Plan B in preparation for life going pear-shaped, and yet you are so unprepared for something as basic as a local power outage!

I had all of €35 in my wallet, and probably €50 worth of pocket change sitting in a Thai alms bowl on my desk. My two small power banks, also on my desk, were both lifeless after my recent trip to Albania because I’d been too lazy to recharge them.

I had limited gas in the car.

And no bread at home…

I’ve been through this before. I’ve lived through hurricanes in south Louisiana, including Katrina and Gustav, which left my house powerless for four or five days. And I was working in Lower Manhattan in August 2003 when the Great Northeast Blackout left a giant swath of Canada, the Midwest, and the Northeast without power for up to four days.

But those hit different.

In Louisiana, I had two generators to power parts of our house. And I had a gun-safe in the closet that held spare cash and a lot of gold. In New York, I had exactly $1 in my wallet and I was stuck sleeping on a friend’s couch since I had no way to get home to New Jersey. But in neither episode was America completely dark.

When your entire country loses power (and the country next to you, as well), and you have no way to access cash, access food, or access a gas station so that you can drive toward the nearest city with power, your perspective changes.

See, I already know my Plan B if ever I need to bug out and land in a welcoming country somewhere else in the world. (I’ll be moving to Uruguay… where, as long as you show up with the right documents, you can get residency pretty much right away.) But I don’t have a plan for a local breakdown. So as a result, I’m putting in motion El Jefe’s Plan B—The Local Edition.

First up: Cash. In a crisis, cash is king.

I’ll make sure Yulia and I have ready access to cash, should we need it… €35 wouldn’t have even filled the gas tank halfway. And there’s clearly no guarantee that any kind of electronic-based monetary system will work, meaning ATM, debit, and credit cards would be useless.

Food: We have a large closet where we store luggage and boxes of seasonal clothes and whatnot. I’m clearing a spot for one of those big plastic bins you find at Home Depot, and I’m packing that puppy with canned and dried goods that last for years and that we can cook at home (we have a gas stove) or take with us on the road if we feel the need to skedaddle.

Gas: In the wake of Katrina, I’d started topping up my tank the minute a hurricane was potentially headed for Louisiana. I didn’t want to be in the position I found myself in post-Katrina, in which I couldn’t find gas for two days, and when I did, the lines stretched just past the exit to forever.

I’m going to re-adopt that policy—modified—here in Portugal.

Hurricanes are easy to plan for because they take time to move across the ocean. It’s impossible to know when a countrywide power outage, or even an earthquake will take down the power grid for days at a time. With our Mini Cooper Countryman, we can drive about 420 miles on one tank. That would get us well into Spain or southwestern France… where hopefully life is less pear-shaped. So, I will be filling my tank every time it’s near the half-full mark.

I’ll also be keeping multiple power banks charged at all times, and I’m gonna look for one of those hand-crank radios. Not having access to news during the Day of Darkness was a bit unnerving.

And finally… physical books. I’m gonna slowly stockpile books I’ve been wanting to read because when the power goes, entertainment is dead.

During the Day of Darkness, I read the entirety of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s… which was oddly apropos, given that Holly Golightly was looking to escape a past life for new one.

One might call that… seeking a Plan B.