Powerless journey

Blackout in Croatia caused powerless travel

It was briefly dark in many places in the Balkans.

(Bild: APA/picturedesk.com/Georg Hochmuth)

An outage in four countries kept the Balkans busy for hours on Friday. Numerous vacationers experienced the problems directly on site. A group of Upper Austrian A-level students also had to make do without electricity for a short time during their trip, and several of them described their impressions to the "Krone" newspaper.

Suddenly nothing worked. "We had just got up when the first person said that the toilet flush wasn't working, another person's hairdryer wasn't working and it wasn't possible to charge his cell phone either," explains Simon Parzer, who celebrated his graduation in Šestanovac, Croatia, together with 15 friends from HTL Andorf. At first, the graduates thought that only the electricity in the house was affected. But the truth was that there was a much bigger problem.

International disruption
Due to an international disruption, large parts of Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Serbia were without electricity on Friday. "Our water reserves were already running a little low. We wanted to go to the supermarket, but everything was closed. The petrol stations were also closed. The locals told us that it was something completely new that the power was out in four countries at the same time," says Parzer the day after, when the group was already on its planned way back.

No panic
"It was bizarre to see that everything was closed and nothing was working. But there was no panic, we wanted to spend the last day of our trip relaxing by the pool anyway," the group recounts their impressions. The Upper Austrians had power again at 4 pm. The reason for the outage is said to have been the sharp rise in electricity consumption due to the heat.