Asked how long it has been since he spoke to the president of E-Redes, the main operator of the electricity distribution network in mainland Portugal for high, medium and low voltage networks, Gonçalo Lopes replied “for more than a week”.
The mayor reported that he asked José Ferrari Careto for a meeting after realizing that Leiria “was going to be one of the last municipalities” to have electricity restored.
“I proposed to him a tactical plan to make this process faster, with more efficient management of the generators, their mobility, the development of a plan that I called the ‘Northern Municipal Action Plan’, since it was the most affected site, the need for a better line of communication for cases of what we called unfair lines”, he explained.
According to the mayor, the unfair lines refer to the case of streets where the transformation station “is energized”, but at the end of the street “there are always three or four houses that do not have” electricity.
Gonçalo Lopes said that the president of E-Redes “ended up leaving the meeting” which continued “with the other directors who were there”.
Faced with the existence, last month, of a conflict with E-Redes due to the delay in restoring energy and whether legal action was being considered against the company due to the losses resulting from this problem, Gonçalo Lopes recalled that its activity is regulated.
“When a service is granted with this responsibility which, in essence, ends up being our sovereignty as a country, our security condition which is in the hands of a company, the regulatory authority has obligations to control prices, tariffs, maintenance, situations in which it is necessary to make compensations, indemnities, verify a set of means that are made available so that the service is not compromised”, he continued.
The municipality asked the Energy Services Regulatory Authority (ERSE) to “activate all means to be able to understand what happened and to be able to defend the interests of customers, whether companies, but, above all, people”.
“If ERSE does its job, there is no need to litigate”, he assured.
As for telecommunications, Gonçalo Lopes stressed that “the entire territory has reduced communication capacity” and there are “landlines for many people” that are still not working.
“The information I obtained yesterday [quarta-feira] just from one of the operators, we were talking about six thousand people still without a mobile network”, said the president of the Municipality of Leiria.
Eighteen people died in Portugal, six of which in the municipality of Leiria, following the passage of the Kristin, Leonardo and Marta depressions, which also caused many hundreds of injuries and displacement.
The total or partial destruction of homes, businesses and equipment, the fall of trees and structures, the closure of roads, schools and transport services, and the cut of energy, water and communications, floods and floods are the main material consequences of the storm.
The Centro, Lisbon and Vale do Tejo and Alentejo regions were the most affected.
The calamity situation that covered the 68 most affected municipalities ended on February 15th.
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