Gibraltar has been struck by a total power outage, as emergency services report being inundated by calls for help from residents.
Local fire and rescue services said they had received a ‘substantial’ number of calls from members of the public trapped in elevators, while the government confirmed that the outage was ’caused by damage from a contractor’.
‘Due to the power failure, our control room is receiving substantial number of calls from persons trapped in lifts’, the Gibraltar Fire and Rescue Services said in a statement.
‘All appliances responding to incidents throughout Gibraltar. Crews are being redeployed to attend to these numerous calls’.
The emergency number i currently down due to the power outage, as well as the Royal Gibraltar Police phone lines, local news outlet GBC reports.
A Gibraltar-bound British Airways flight from London Heathrow has been diverted to Malaga airport, but the airline is yet to confirm whether this was related to the outage.
The blackout has also affected commercial activity, forcing the closure of some businesses.
Traffic lights have also stopped working, with drivers and pedestrians advised to take extreme caution on the roads.
Power is understood to have gone out at around 1.40pm local time.
Gibraltar was struck by a total power outage on Tuesday afternoon leaving dozens of residents trapped in lifts
The Gibraltar Electric Authority confirmed the blackout, writing in a statement on X that engineers were currently working to restore power and that testing had begun to ‘identify the damaged cables’.
Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of Spain, which was struck by a sweeping power outage just a few months ago.
The power-cut in April has gone down in history as one of the worst ever in Europe after it affected tens of millions of people across the Iberian Peninsula for several hours.
It disrupted businesses, hospitals, transit systems, cellular networks and other critical infrastructure.
Emergency services and rail workers in Spain had to help evacuate some 35,000 people from over 100 trains that stopped on the tracks when the electricity was cut.
Spain’s government said in a report in June that its grid operator Redeia had miscalculated the correct mix of energy in the system.
The government also blamed some conventional power plants, or thermal power plants using coal, gas and nuclear, for failing to help maintain an appropriate voltage level and as a result, the grid was unable to cope with a surge in voltage that triggered a cascade of power plant disconnections, ultimately leading to the outage.
This is a breaking news story, more to follow.
