• The incident was caused by a waterspout (cap de fibló) that hit the island from north to south.
• The Company has a Special Maintenance Plan that will facilitate the repair work.
• The recovery of one of the two lines affected will allow service to be restored.

At 9:51 this morning, a partial outage in the electricity supply occurred in the western part of the island of Menorca. The outage has affected the Ciudadela and Mercadal substations, both connected to the 132kV transmission grid, but the Dragonera and Mahón substations remained operational and were kept up and running. The demand lost due to the outage amounted to 32 MW out of a total of 55 MW at the time of the incident occurred.

This incident in the electricity transmission grid was caused by a waterspout that hit the island of Menorca from north to south. The storm and heavy rains have caused, since the early hours, severe damage to high, medium and low voltage lines, as well as to telephone infrastructures and some real estate.

The storm has affected two lines, causing serious structural damage not only to electricity towers but also to conductors. So far, the following has been confirmed that the storm brought down two towers in the Dragonera-Mercadal line (15.5 kilometres) and another two towers and a conductor in the Dragonera-Ciudadela line (35.7 kilometres).

The length of the two lines affected, as well as the difficulties posed by the orography of the area and the temporary closure of maritime transport, are making detection and power restoration tasks difficult. Although Red Eléctrica is mobilising all the necessary manpower and technical resources to restore damaged assets as quickly as possible, the adverse circumstances could prolong the recovery efforts.

Currently, the Company has a Special Maintenance Plan, with spare parts for towers, emergency towers and cables on the island of Menorca that will facilitate the repair work underway.

The teams that are working in the field are currently analysing the complete layout of the line in order to decide which are the most optimal measures to be taken. With the restoration of one of the two affected lines will allow the service to be restored.

Red Eléctrica is keeping the authorities informed in a timely manner and is coordinated with all the relevant public administrations and services involved (General Administration of the State, Regional and Local Administrations and Civil Protection and Emergency services).