Barcelona. Twenty days with up to ten hours without electricity in the Raval
Problem: The Government negotiates with Endesa while energy poverty persists
At the gates of a block without light in
Sabadell
, a young man shows a neighbor how a battery-powered lamp works.
Any contraption that lights up is listed in the building, where they go for the
sixth consecutive week
in the dark.
"I have the floor full of candles. I'm afraid that there is a fire," acknowledges the woman.
Every two days he goes to the apartment of some acquaintances to load up on the food they let him store in the fridge.
They have also lent him a stove, bottles and a stove to get out of the bad step, which has occurred with the cold.
"I throw so many blankets over myself that I sink into bed. The temperature drops a lot at night," he confesses.
It was on
November 12
when
Endesa
technicians
moved after a police intervention and cut off the cable that fed the property by the roots.
The company claims that the
25 homes
on the farm were in danger of being connected in a fraudulent way.
The splice was undone twice before, but was redone.
Then it was unleashed in summer, when it was not so harsh to bear.
The neighbors had been punctured for about five years when laying.
They argue that they got hooked after trying to regulate the supply, which was not done when the building was built.
"We signed contracts to have meters, but when they were to be installed, there was no connection," says
María
.
Groping around the house with a flashlight, he shows the broken ice that covers the food, the
camping gas
in which he cooks and the buckets in which he pours the water heated with butane to bathe.
"I asked the
City Council
for a generator
and we would pay for the diesel to make it work. They answered that they neither have nor can they bring it," he protests.
Portable gas cooker.
M. CRUZ
Endesa demands documentation to provide a provisional remedy, while the City Council sees it as risky to advance when the anomaly will be resolved.
"It is desperate not knowing when we will have a normal life," complains
Ana
, who has bought a small generator: "It costs
700 euros a month
, apart from gasoline, and it only works for three or four hours. I use it to turn my son on. the computer and do homework. He has failed three subjects, because how can he study all the time with a flashlight? "
Another challenge is
not being cut off
.
Ana's cell phone drains the battery shortly after dark: "I charge it at work, but it doesn't last all day. Others plug it in at the bar, at the hairdresser, at relatives' houses ...".
Neighbors get used to the idea of spending the holidays in the dark.
From what they count, the power can take
at least a month and a half to re-establish
.
Placing the connection costs almost
16,000 euros
.
"It's a problem. There are people here who don't even have enough to eat," says María.
Conchi
and
Ariel
have no income.
She has been unemployed since 2018 and it is difficult for him to find jobs in the black, as before the pandemic.
A couple of weeks ago, Ariel was
hospitalized for gas poisoning
and the couple's baby had to receive assisted respiration.
"It was 15 minutes after a misfortune happened," they testify.
It happened when a generator started that burned badly and forced the houses to be vacated.
He was transferred by landlords who rent part of the homes with a suspicious method: they collect them by hand and without a contract.
They demanded
10 euros
in exchange for connecting to the engine.
The unclear ownership of at least part of the property further entangles finding the solution.
With such a scenario, Ramón does not want more punctures.
"I see myself with the water around my neck with the Covid and they finish us off with light. What would go away in a month will go away in 10 days. We are fed up," he says.
Other cases
The example of Sabadell is shocking because there are so many days without electricity, although in other areas it is lost for hours whenever the thermometers fall.
Endesa quantifies
190 blackouts
between November and December in streets of the
Culubret
neighborhood
(
Figueres
),
160
in
Font de la Pólvora
(Girona) and
13
in the second week of this month in
Sant Roc
(Badalona).
The company attributes this to the fact that the lines are disconnected to protect itself from overloads that link to marijuana crops and irregular hookups, of which it has dismantled
more than 260
in the three neighborhoods this year.
Neighborhood platforms and the
Alliance Against Energy Poverty
reply that not everything is due to illegal plantations and that the electricity
network is
obviously
deficient
in the three neighborhoods, burdened by poverty.
The company responds that the installation is perfect and the maintenance is constant.
"In our city, hundreds of floors were detected in a building with nine floors in which consumption was as if there were 85 and there were no cuts in the area. The infrastructure is obsolete and there is fraud, but it has to do with energy poverty" , argues the mayor of Figueres,
Agnès Lladó
, who is considering stopping paying bills to Endesa and depositing payments in a court while the blackouts persist.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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