Molló remains without electricity supply since 12:00 p.m. this Sunday after a day marked by wind, which has also caused mobile coverage problems in the municipality of Ripollès. The first incidents in the network were detected around 10:00 a.m. and, by mid-afternoon, there was no forecast for service restoration.
The main hypothesis managed by the City Council is that the fall of a tree on the electrical line would have originated a fire and the subsequent interruption of the supply. The telephone service was interrupted starting at 12:00 hours and was recovered before 15:00 hours, although the mayor, Pep Coma, denounces that the situation has once again left the town isolated for hours.
A fire between Molló and Camprodon
Firefighters of the Generalitat confirmed that at 11:04 a.m. this Sunday a fire broke out between Molló and Camprodon. Up to six units worked in the area and the fire was brought under control at 1:48 p.m. The personnel left a water line installed in case of any reactivation.
In parallel to the action for the fire, the municipality was losing communication capacity. The mayor maintains that the power outage and the fall of telephony prevented the council from transferring information to the residents during a good part of the episode.
Discomfort of the town hall due to the lack of communication
"We have no electricity nor a way to contact the distributor to get more information" - Pep Coma, mayor of Molló
Coma laments that the municipality has been left incommunicado and assures that the emergency phone 112 has not worked either. The mayor also reproaches that the Generalitat's Civil Protection network does not operate normally in Molló and specifies that the internal network that city councils use to contact the Centre d"Emergències de Catalunya when mobile coverage fails also does not provide service in the municipality.
"We cannot activate protocols, we cannot do anything, we are completely incommunicado" - Pep Coma, mayor of Molló
The mayor also denounces that the council has not been able to communicate anything to the population because they were, in his words, incommunicado. He also assures that the outages have worsened with the passage of time and that before they lasted a few hours, while now they extend much longer.
Recent precedent for another wind episode
15 days ago, Molló already suffered another power and telephone outage also due to the wind. On that occasion, the electricity supply was not recovered until the next day around 8:00 PM and mobile coverage returned later, once electricity was restored.
The municipal discomfort has worsened due to the repetition of these episodes. Coma maintains that every time there is a strong wind, even if extraordinary, the town spends hours without electricity or coverage, with a direct impact on local businesses, which cannot work or charge and accumulate economic losses. The mayor also adds that the deployment of 5G has worsened in rural areas and summarizes the situation with a phrase that reflects the municipality's weariness. "It's going back 60 or 70 years".
Awaiting the recovery of the supply, uncertainty persists in Molló due to a problem that repeats itself again in just over two weeks and that this Sunday has left the municipality without a clear forecast on when it will be able to fully recover basic services.