The whole European grid is essentially connected at this point, it's a simple trade of resiliency for efficiency. People just forget about the resiliency part until something goes wrong
The European grid is a connected synchronous grid. Usually that would add stability but it also means if a single country's grid blacks out then their neighbours have to respond to that. Portugal and Spain's grids will be intimately connected which won't have helped.
Portugal has no electricity as we speak. Funny enough telcos and 4G/5G are fine for now, I'm guessing batteries and diesel backups kicked in and are doing their job.
Depending on country there are sometimes very strict requirements - or just traditions sometimes - around building up strong survivability in face of total loss of grid power. Including diesel and turbine generators on bigger BTSes let alone exchanges. If you drop capacity per terminal (so bandwidth) you can cover a lot more range at times which helps with mobile network resiliency.
> Including diesel and turbine generators on bigger BTSes let alone exchanges.
Or if you’re AT&T, grid natural gas backup, so your CO goes down if electrical and natural gas both go out once the batteries die. Did I mention how they didn’t build in roll-up generator connection points and had to emergency install those?
Old-school PSTN folks looked at XKCD 705 and chuckled. Late to the party, pal.
The telephone network was designed from the ground up to be completely independent of _everything_ except fuel deliveries. If grid power is up, that's convenient, but it's totally not required.
In many places, that's because telegraph and telephone lines got there before the power grid did. Lines running along railroads connected communities that had no centralized power generation. Delco-light plants at individual farms might be the only electric power for miles, aside from the communications lines themselves. Even if the only phone was at the rail depot, it still had to power itself somehow. As those communities sprouted their own telephone offices and subscriber lines branching throughout town, the office had its own batteries for primary power, and eventually generators to recharge them. (Telegraph networks largely ran from just batteries, recharged chemically rather than with generators, for years.)
Fast-forward a century and there was just never a need to depend on anything else. As long as the diesel bowser can get down the driveway, the office can run indefinitely.
Among old AT&T/Bell/WECo hands, the devotion to reliable service goes far beyond fanatical. Many offices built during the cold-war have showers in the basement and a room of shelf-stable food, though these are no longer maintained. The expectation was that whoever was in the office when the bombs dropped, would keep things running as long as they could. And when they couldn't anymore, well, there was probably nobody left to call anyway.
Update: still no electricity, 4G/5G is barely working, city is more chaotic than usual but not that dramatic as some media say - there are huge queues to the buses and smaller shops that are still working, more people are outside.
Not required, but engineers tend to enjoy this sort of thing. Also, since it affected some 60 million people and EU-wide grid interconnects, someone will have to explain what happened.
For that incident, an expert panel was set up in July, the interim report was published in November, and the final report in Feburary 2025: so it'll take a few months.
Noth Koera doesn't have any beef with Europe. Whereas the Russian propaganda says quite shocking things about Europe every now and again, not to mention their previous prime minister that is suggesting nuking European cities on Twitter.
Ok...? Is there like more to this narrative or are we supposed to buy that russia just hates all of europe for being europe now? Whatever happened to the "rational actor" canard?
Europe is helping Ukraine it its defense against Russia.
Russia has sabotaged a lot of things in multiple EU countries, including Spain.
It's not far fetched to imagine Russia being the root cause of this, or being implicated in some way. Even if they are not, they 100% are watching this closely and learn how they can disrupt power throughout Europe.
I'm not saying Russia did it, just that they could be the cause of this.
Weakening Europe is in their interest, and they already have blatantly done smaller scale sabotage. It wouldn't weaken their position, as you said, Europe is not really interested in taking Russia seriously atm. Sabotages, killings, politician corruption and public disinformation have been common tactics for them for a decade now.
Now that Russia's #1 enemy is under their control, I'm not sure they are afraid to take on Europe more directly.
Well, it's been for quite a while now. Acts of micro- (or mini-) aggression like fires, explosives in commercial shipping services, broken sea cables just became daily news.
The only positive aspect of this is after the root cause is found, the grid will become more resilient in the long term (but these kinds of changes typically take long time).
Again, how would these actions do anything but weaken Russia's position given the EU's apparent willingness to stay on the sidelines? Wouldn't ukraine benefit the most from the perception that Russia is at war with the EU?
For the record, I don't think that this particular event is a Russian act of sabotage.
But Russia is an aggressive authoritarian state that was already caught for (smaller) acts of sabotage in EU, some of them quite dangerous. Why they are doing this? Who knows, war in Ukraine was not rational too. Perhaps some people want to be evil just for the sake of being evil.
As a Russian emigrant, I long stopped trying to rationalize Kremlin decisions. Why authoritarians are authoritarians? Who knows. Mad with power or something.
The strategy is not even a secret. Russia sees itself as a major influence of the Europe.
You cannot control stable governments, so you destabilise them with various tools for prolonged periods of time and then you end up with a country which is much easier to influence.
> given the EU's apparent willingness to stay on the sidelines?
... Wait, how are you defining that? Much of the EU is about as close as it is possible to be to being at war with Russia without actually sending in troops.
Outside of discussing whether Russia is behind this or not, the broader Russian strategy seems aimed at undermining trust in European governments. [1]
The goal would be to create enough pressure from people - frustrated by problems like power cuts — so that governments must withdraw their support for Ukraine.
Any "WW III" fearmongering is similar : intimidate everyone into withdrawing support.
Many European countries have created emergency guides to help citizens preparing for crisis like this one. [2]
This, I guess, has the underlying goal of maintaining trust in European governments.
Spain underinvests in its military. Russian mafias also control much of the costas.
I would surmise that the Russians think that Spain and Portugal are cowed, and want to keep them intimidated and prevent them from increasing their aid to Ukraine.
Good place as any to ask: do you need a VPN to access the “Western” internet? Is the block on the Russian side, or are Western websites blocking Russian IPs?
The block is on the Russian side (in most cases), but not all Western sites are blocked (Hacker News is working). Most of Russians know how to use VPNs, though it is extremely inconvenient.
No in most cases. Meta products are banned, twitter, discord and youtube (this one mostly works in reality), but pretty much everything else is unaffected.
Some Western side companies banned Russia by IP's like Intel, but in general, my list of websites to tunnel through a VPN is rather short, like a dozen and mostly to unblock youtube as meta and twitter are cancer anyway.
Why is that? We're not saying it's definitely Russia, but exploring the possibility they could be behind this.
After the multiple sabotages, killings, corruption, as well as the invasion of a neighbor country, we have some reasons to think Russia is a bad state actor.
Russian establishment DOES hate western civilization, that is not "narrative" that is fact told by them in live tv to your face FOR LAST 70 YEARS. That is not "narrative".
Western style of life is not only EU but also USA. I do not know how people can even doubt this lol.
If they wanted western life in russia, then establishment will make changes to have it there, no ? Russia is NOT democracy, it is tyranny, autocracy. Again it is not narrative it is what they do there lol
They hate west because by western standards they will be in jail for all LOOTING of russias natural resources and killing and abusing their own citizens. West is punishing people who do bad things. Russian oligarchy kids did nothing wrong, presumably.
contrary to west, in russia you get beaten by police because your children in west posted something on Xtwitter...
Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Boris Berezovsky, Sergei Magnitsky, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalia Estemirova, Anna Politkovskaya, yuri Shchekochikhin, Vasily Melnikov , Vladislav Avayev , Sergey Protosenya, Yevgeniy Palant, Yuri Voronov, Ravil Maganov, Vladimir Sungorkin, Anatoly Gerashchenko, Vadim Boyko, Vladimir Makei, Grigory Kochenov, Vladimir Bidenov + Pavel Antov, and thousands of others.
most spectacular was - Pyotr Kucherenko where two men holded him and third put shopping bag on his head, and noone saw nothing in whole plane... except three photos were taking of incident...
I don't buy this argument, it's the pinnacle of selection bias.
`any != all` after all.
Your argument is essentially; because some Russian people send some of their children to be educated or buy some property in the west (as a portfolio of how many?) that the argument that the state of Russia dislikes the EU holds no water.
To me, it's hardly evidence of anything, just like how some people in the UK fetishise Russia- yet the UK government is actively hostile and condemns without hesitation- Russias actions towards Ukraine.
My argument is not just about "some people", people who are pretty high up in the hierarchy. How about russian ex-president?
The "hate west" narrative is pushed because it makes sense during the war. If Putin decides now praising the west will let him keep the power the propaganda machine will do a 180 turn
so they HATE west no matter what they say, so you are correct in that.
but you are making wrong conclusion,
machine is not bad thing BUT they are good people.
They ARE bad actors no matter if they use propaganda machine that way or any other way or not use at all. they are bad actors period. propaganda machine is separate thing.
The EU is the main provider of financial support to Ukraine, the country which Russia is currently attempting to invade, along with one of the major provider of weapons and training.
Some more-unhinged ultranationalist elements of Russian societies loathe Western culture and what they see as 'decadent' Western values on their culture. This is not new. Xenophobia and hate of the Other has a long and sordid history in Russia.
Moreover, they are unable to just live-and-let-live and actively go out of their way to make other peoples lives miserable. This is due to pervasive zero-sum thinking in Russian strategic thinking. They are fixated on the idea that in order for Russia to 'win', others must suffer and lose.
I often have the same thoughts as you because, based on what I’ve seen, their actions aren’t strictly rational. For example, the damage to undersea cables will just be repaired, and it only end up angering everyone. Sometimes they also start local fires. I don’t really understand it either.
I do not really think that this needed to be a russians work tho. Spain and Portugal are really kinda far and it would be massively idiotic move even for them.
Some people close to power in Russia (Dugin) actually seem to believe Russia natural range is from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
"Putin channels ultranationalist discourse, such as the Izborsk Club and the neo-fascist Alexander Dugin, in calling for quasi-religious rebirth of Russian dominance, an agenda that seeks to swallow “Little Russia” into a renewed Russian empire that stretches from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a phrase popularized by Dugin and repeated by Putin."
no, most electronics is shielded by default/by law. check UL/CE requirements. but it can make circuit breakers "turn off". EMP meaning nuclear high above, there exist emp devices of size of small family van, but those have range few 100 m/ft
There's a connected grid across most of continental europe. If Portugal's grid blacked out unexpectedly then Spain's grid could have been made unstable too, which then continue onwards to South of France and Italy.
Just a typical cascade failure because it means everything's now running with lower tolerances.
A cascade failure (of any system) would propagate until it runs into a part of the system that's resilient enough to not fall over.
Several people have said the amount of power transferred between France and Spain is very low compared to the amount of power consumed inside either France or Spain, which seems like as good as reason as any that it didn't affect France. The grid in France was presumably able to absorb the sudden change in power flow without itself breaking.
There aren't as many interconnects between Spain and France proportional to generation as there are between Spain and Portugal.
Also France has a massive Nuclear base load and is usually an electricity exporter so their grid will be a bit more resilient (the spinning mass of massive turbines in Nuclear plants provides inertia to the grid itself) than the Spanish/Portuguese grid that would have had a decent renewable mix.
At the same time, electricity grids will have various measures to prevent instability spreading. Whether that's load shedding (dropping parts of the grid), removing production, or what France likely did, dropping the interconnects. This is usually fully automated.
If there were more connections to France it _maybe_ could have spread further. Nuclear power plants can be twitchy if things go south so if it had spread enough to knock 2-3 french plants offline then that could potentially have toppled France which then as a big exporter could have swept across much of the rest of mainland Europe (and maybe even the UK which might struggle to adapt to the loss from France through its HVDC interconnects if all three were maxed out)
I don't know why you are so enthusiastic about this site. Whatever, my assumption was that they are displaying the data in 1 hour intervals as the picker suggests and showing a warning currently about the affected regions is consistent with that assumption.
Always picture someone with a big can of diesel filling up a generator. Experience says it could be a genny running on natural gas. Had that at work before.
I think cell phone towers use surprisingly little energy, just a few kW. So even longer term operation should be possible withs bobs backyard generator running on vodka.
But I would guess the whole network equipment would draw quite a bit, especially a modern infrastructure.
We had a (much smaller) regional (Lübeck and Ostholstein) power outage here in Northern Germany in I think 2018 or 19. No mobile internet until everything was restored ~6 hours later, and most of the time no other cell service either.
Well, sex and looting, and maybe inventing new music genres.
The legend is that hip hop and sampling started after the blackout in NYC. Some electronic and music stores were looted and the recording equipment eventually ended up in the hands of musicians looking to make a new sound: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/new-york-c...
Do people forget how to drive if there are no lights? I can't imagine many people would think "well, there are no lights, which means GREEEEEEEN!". Over here, a traffic light that doesn't work means it's now a stop sign.
That's still a recipe for massive gridlock as treating most traffic junctions as stop signs doesn't scale unless there are traffic cops to manually direct traffic
I've never seen a traffic cop but I've driven past maybe fifty or a hundred broken or shutoff traffic lights, mainly in our largest city and never got stuck. Local law states that you give cars coming from the right precedence and the crossing self organises around that.
I work in Barcelona and live in a town 20Km outside it. I drove back home just fine at around 16PM. Some traffic in the city, but manegable. My town has had electricity in homes since 15PM, some neighbourghs told me.
At night I drove to my parent's (different town, 10km away) since I couldn't communicate with them and was worried. Their town was pitch black. People were driving mostly safe and slowly. Of course you get the random POS that doesn't care, but I didn't feel in danger at any moment. My parents were fine. I drove back home later and same story.
I just woke up (it's 7AM here) and the Internet is back and I have a message from my parents, their electricity is back too.
Overall, I didn't see any crazy behaviour.
It shows that even when the original issues are solved the reboot takes time due to power station being spooled down due to excessive production. I hope it is all back before telecoms start draining the batteries, otherwise things get uglier
A similar thing happened last June, with Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, and most of the Croatian coastline losing power simultaneously.
Definitely felt surreal to first lose power to the degree that even traffic lights were no longer working, and then to hear it's also happening across the region just before mobile networks also went offline.
I am currently in my work office in Madrid, main building has electricity so I guess they have some backup generators, the kitchen however is out of service.
According to local newspapers metro network, airport and traffic lights are all down
Dunno about Spain/portugal, but in North America they’re usually just for elevators/alarms, partial hallway lighting & maybe water pumps (for firefighting).
Maybe a tech company with servers will pay extra for full backup, but it’s not typical.
Without fail, during every grid outage, some will fail to start and there will be elevator rescue calls throughout the city.
1,241 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 602 ms ] thread#irony
Sounds like a major infrastructure risk given that it is possible for more than one country to experience a full loss of power.
EDIT: Andorra is also affected, so that is three.
[0] https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20250428/10624908/caida-ge...
Not something that's easy to test for.
(No relation to the other infamous Signal chat :))
There should be 4-8 hours of battery backup on every site - at least.
It's always fascinated me during disasters how independent telecomm can be. Kudos for all the engineering that went into it!
I.e. even when any other conceivable dependency is down, the networks keep running.
Or if you’re AT&T, grid natural gas backup, so your CO goes down if electrical and natural gas both go out once the batteries die. Did I mention how they didn’t build in roll-up generator connection points and had to emergency install those?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539586
The telephone network was designed from the ground up to be completely independent of _everything_ except fuel deliveries. If grid power is up, that's convenient, but it's totally not required.
In many places, that's because telegraph and telephone lines got there before the power grid did. Lines running along railroads connected communities that had no centralized power generation. Delco-light plants at individual farms might be the only electric power for miles, aside from the communications lines themselves. Even if the only phone was at the rail depot, it still had to power itself somehow. As those communities sprouted their own telephone offices and subscriber lines branching throughout town, the office had its own batteries for primary power, and eventually generators to recharge them. (Telegraph networks largely ran from just batteries, recharged chemically rather than with generators, for years.)
Fast-forward a century and there was just never a need to depend on anything else. As long as the diesel bowser can get down the driveway, the office can run indefinitely.
Among old AT&T/Bell/WECo hands, the devotion to reliable service goes far beyond fanatical. Many offices built during the cold-war have showers in the basement and a room of shelf-stable food, though these are no longer maintained. The expectation was that whoever was in the office when the bombs dropped, would keep things running as long as they could. And when they couldn't anymore, well, there was probably nobody left to call anyway.
Who are you and what's Signal?
(plus 11 million of Portugal for a total of 60 million people in the Iberian Peninsula)
Not the best news source, but it’s the only one I’ve found so far. HN moderators, feel free to replace it later with a better one.
Supposedly also France is affected (unconfirmed)
Translated version: https://elpais-com.translate.goog/economia/2025-04-28/apagon...
For that incident, an expert panel was set up in July, the interim report was published in November, and the final report in Feburary 2025: so it'll take a few months.
Things like Air Crash investigations don't take a year because of paperwork FFS. Investigating things takes immense time.
So you can weaken your opponent without getting the backlash.
All the money, humanitarian aid, weapons, intelligence, training and geopolitical backing beg to differ.
They have already assassinated People in Spain last year
https://www.politico.eu/article/maxim-kuzminov-russia-ukrain...
The only positive aspect of this is after the root cause is found, the grid will become more resilient in the long term (but these kinds of changes typically take long time).
But Russia is an aggressive authoritarian state that was already caught for (smaller) acts of sabotage in EU, some of them quite dangerous. Why they are doing this? Who knows, war in Ukraine was not rational too. Perhaps some people want to be evil just for the sake of being evil.
As a Russian emigrant, I long stopped trying to rationalize Kremlin decisions. Why authoritarians are authoritarians? Who knows. Mad with power or something.
You cannot control stable governments, so you destabilise them with various tools for prolonged periods of time and then you end up with a country which is much easier to influence.
Same with the undersea cables.
... Wait, how are you defining that? Much of the EU is about as close as it is possible to be to being at war with Russia without actually sending in troops.
so blackout is attack from russia. so stop spreading lies of terrorist russian state.
The goal would be to create enough pressure from people - frustrated by problems like power cuts — so that governments must withdraw their support for Ukraine.
Any "WW III" fearmongering is similar : intimidate everyone into withdrawing support.
Many European countries have created emergency guides to help citizens preparing for crisis like this one. [2] This, I guess, has the underlying goal of maintaining trust in European governments.
[1] : https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-increasing-hybrid-att...
[2] : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-commission-urges-sto...
I would surmise that the Russians think that Spain and Portugal are cowed, and want to keep them intimidated and prevent them from increasing their aid to Ukraine.
Some Western side companies banned Russia by IP's like Intel, but in general, my list of websites to tunnel through a VPN is rather short, like a dozen and mostly to unblock youtube as meta and twitter are cancer anyway.
After the multiple sabotages, killings, corruption, as well as the invasion of a neighbor country, we have some reasons to think Russia is a bad state actor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0unhxkWkiKY
Western style of life is not only EU but also USA. I do not know how people can even doubt this lol.
If they wanted western life in russia, then establishment will make changes to have it there, no ? Russia is NOT democracy, it is tyranny, autocracy. Again it is not narrative it is what they do there lol
Hating the west is only an ideology given to plebs
contrary to west, in russia you get beaten by police because your children in west posted something on Xtwitter...
Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Boris Berezovsky, Sergei Magnitsky, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalia Estemirova, Anna Politkovskaya, yuri Shchekochikhin, Vasily Melnikov , Vladislav Avayev , Sergey Protosenya, Yevgeniy Palant, Yuri Voronov, Ravil Maganov, Vladimir Sungorkin, Anatoly Gerashchenko, Vadim Boyko, Vladimir Makei, Grigory Kochenov, Vladimir Bidenov + Pavel Antov, and thousands of others.
most spectacular was - Pyotr Kucherenko where two men holded him and third put shopping bag on his head, and noone saw nothing in whole plane... except three photos were taking of incident...
`any != all` after all.
Your argument is essentially; because some Russian people send some of their children to be educated or buy some property in the west (as a portfolio of how many?) that the argument that the state of Russia dislikes the EU holds no water.
To me, it's hardly evidence of anything, just like how some people in the UK fetishise Russia- yet the UK government is actively hostile and condemns without hesitation- Russias actions towards Ukraine.
The "hate west" narrative is pushed because it makes sense during the war. If Putin decides now praising the west will let him keep the power the propaganda machine will do a 180 turn
so they HATE west no matter what they say, so you are correct in that.
but you are making wrong conclusion,
machine is not bad thing BUT they are good people.
They ARE bad actors no matter if they use propaganda machine that way or any other way or not use at all. they are bad actors period. propaganda machine is separate thing.
Moreover, they are unable to just live-and-let-live and actively go out of their way to make other peoples lives miserable. This is due to pervasive zero-sum thinking in Russian strategic thinking. They are fixated on the idea that in order for Russia to 'win', others must suffer and lose.
I do not really think that this needed to be a russians work tho. Spain and Portugal are really kinda far and it would be massively idiotic move even for them.
"Putin channels ultranationalist discourse, such as the Izborsk Club and the neo-fascist Alexander Dugin, in calling for quasi-religious rebirth of Russian dominance, an agenda that seeks to swallow “Little Russia” into a renewed Russian empire that stretches from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a phrase popularized by Dugin and repeated by Putin."
https://brill.com/view/journals/joah/4/1-2/article-p126_10.x...
>renewed Russian empire that stretches from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a phrase popularized by Dugin and repeated by Putin."
This is a direct lie. Putin has never said this.
And one of the greatest lies that is being spread about Putin that he intends to conquer Europe and recreate Russian Empire.
https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal...
Just a typical cascade failure because it means everything's now running with lower tolerances.
Several people have said the amount of power transferred between France and Spain is very low compared to the amount of power consumed inside either France or Spain, which seems like as good as reason as any that it didn't affect France. The grid in France was presumably able to absorb the sudden change in power flow without itself breaking.
Also France has a massive Nuclear base load and is usually an electricity exporter so their grid will be a bit more resilient (the spinning mass of massive turbines in Nuclear plants provides inertia to the grid itself) than the Spanish/Portuguese grid that would have had a decent renewable mix.
At the same time, electricity grids will have various measures to prevent instability spreading. Whether that's load shedding (dropping parts of the grid), removing production, or what France likely did, dropping the interconnects. This is usually fully automated.
If there were more connections to France it _maybe_ could have spread further. Nuclear power plants can be twitchy if things go south so if it had spread enough to knock 2-3 french plants offline then that could potentially have toppled France which then as a big exporter could have swept across much of the rest of mainland Europe (and maybe even the UK which might struggle to adapt to the loss from France through its HVDC interconnects if all three were maxed out)
That said, this is all very unlikely.
The wording in the article makes it look like Seville, Barcelona and Valencia are in France.
Would be interesting to see if it will register here.
But I would guess the whole network equipment would draw quite a bit, especially a modern infrastructure.
All essential infrastructure has to. Heck, if you have a landline you can probably siphon off some power from the DC component.
I mean, what else are you gonna do without power?
Sex. At least that's what everyone believes
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/from-here-to-maternity/
The legend is that hip hop and sampling started after the blackout in NYC. Some electronic and music stores were looted and the recording equipment eventually ended up in the hands of musicians looking to make a new sound: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/new-york-c...
* https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t (rolling updates)
* http://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20...
* https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2025/0428/1509881-spain-portug...
The Spanish national operator:
* https://www.ree.es/en
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Eléctrica_de_España
https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2025-04-28/directo-cor...
Edit
However, I can't get the energy provided outage map to load, maybe too many people accessing it
https://gridradar.net/en/blog/post/underfrequency_january_20...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-europes-power-grid-almost...
https://www.acer.europa.eu/news/continental-europe-electrici...
I remember it because power went out in at least 1/3 of Romania back then.
Definitely felt surreal to first lose power to the degree that even traffic lights were no longer working, and then to hear it's also happening across the region just before mobile networks also went offline.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/power-blackout-hits-mon...
~90 page report: https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-c... (beware: PDF)
According to local newspapers metro network, airport and traffic lights are all down
Maybe a tech company with servers will pay extra for full backup, but it’s not typical.
Without fail, during every grid outage, some will fail to start and there will be elevator rescue calls throughout the city.