last Monday, Spanish society lived an unprecedented situation. At 12:33 in the morning of April 28, Spain and Portugal suffer a cut of light that leaves the entire Iberian Peninsula without electricity. The traffic lights are turned off, complicating the circulation, the shops close and the rail transport services and the subway are suspended, leaving thousands of passengers trapped in trains and stations. But in the central writing of the SER chain, located in the Madrid street of Gran Vía, it barely went beyond a black screen for a few seconds.
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The radio did not stop broadcasting during the more than 12 hours that the Spaniards were without internet connection, or electricity, generating scenes that will go down in our country. Groups of people, known or not, forming circles in the streets of the entire territory around a radio to follow at minute what was happening. The director of the Informative Program Hora 14 has chatted with Inés Hernand and Nerea Pérez de las Heras on how this historical event was lived in the writing of the Being, valueing the essential role of the radio.
Javier Casal had to improvise a special program to count, rigorously and detailedly, all the information that was coming from abroad. “We are very lucky to have a brutal territorial network. Practically in any city in Spain there is a broadcaster. That network is the one that supports such a program and a central writing like this. But above all, the role of production equipment and technicians,” he explained.
And without established script, all the radio teams had to get to work to keep the radio in operation. In addition to journalists and producers, the SER and the 40 main ones remained active thanks to the use of their own electrical generators, who continued working with the use of fuel that arrived, “in silver” to the roof of the central writing and prevent the antenna from turning off.
“The radio is reliable because it is simple and rigorous,” said Casal. And it is that at a time when social networks were falling, digital supports came down and there were no other sources of information, a radio batteries was the analog object to which millions of Spaniards hit for hours to receive the last hour of the blackout. “Hopefully many people have discovered it as a reliable medium. It is still a medium that is very alive, perhaps more alive than ever,” he says.
