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Explaining the lack of electricity in a slum

Outside Madrid, a shanty town. Which doesn’t have electricity. Hmm:

The power provider, Naturgy, offers its sympathies to the people of sector six, but says “intensive and irregular use” is crashing the network. It also points out that it has only three registered customers in sector six; the rest are “illegal connections”.

I also imagine that Spain is like Portugal. You can only get a legal ‘leccie supply if the house itself is legal.

To compare, imagine if someone whacked up 14,000 shacks in the Home Counties then argued that it was a breach of human rights that they didn’t have ‘leccie……

14 thoughts on “Explaining the lack of electricity in a slum”

  1. “You kind of die,” says Vargas, a 39-year-old Spanish Roma woman who has lived here with her family for the past 11 years.

    Ah, the mystery is sol-ved as the great Clouseau might say.

  2. I’m impressed by the size of the lady who spends her day sitting in the chair complaining. She evidently has plenty of food.

    More to the point, I can see no reason why the Spanish taxpayer should be compelled to provide for these foreigners who’ve decided to colonise this part of Spain.

    Clearly they should go back to where they came from. I understand that, for the Roma, that’s India.

  3. Two seconds on Google will find plenty of similar stories of gypsies whining about the lack of electricity connections on traveller sites. I particularly enjoyed the one where the electricity company offered to let them pay over the phone by card, but the gypsies refused because they prefer cash.

  4. That was amusing. I clicked on the link to the Guardian & my virus checker put up a flag “You’re unprotected from fake websites”. Avast has obviously got the Guardian sussed. Good software that.

  5. “illegal marijuana plantations in the Cañada which, it says, place the electricity network under such huge strain that it shuts itself down for safety reasons.”

    Scandalous that in this day and age illegal drug dealers are not supplied with unsafe electricity.

  6. Bloke in North Korea (Germany province)

    “the electricity company offered to let them pay over the phone by card, but the gypsies refused because they prefer cash.”

    Can’t they use someone else’s card to pay?

    The Home Counties solve the problem by building the slum dwellings in garages and sheds.

  7. @ witchie – which is why my local Tesco express (about the size of a large corner shop) has to employ a security guard. When I asked the manager he told me it wasn’t the odd item put into a pocket, but that they’d fill up a basket and then walk out of the shop. No wonder i kept on finding abandoned shopping baskets in the alleyway near me.

    I note that the other residents of this shanty town are Moroccans. I visited Morocco once and never met a people I hated more – arrogant, liars, thieves and complete cnuts. I alwys think Morocco is a good argument for carpet bombing.

  8. Out of a sense of curiosity, I thought I’d have a look at the area on Google satellite & Street view. Finding Sector 5, La Canada Real’s not hard. 6 isn’t labelled. A lot of the general area’s planned residential. Tell by the grid pattern streets, regularity of roofs. The only bit one can see looks a possibility is along Carretera Canada Real. That’s going to be one of the original roads. People will have owned plots along it – parcelas they’re called here – put up buildings. There would have been hardly any planning requirements when they went up. Some are obviously industrial. Yards & that. Piles of of building rubble in the usual Spanish way. Often with a house on the plot. Spanish thing. Live beside your business. Some have got swimming pools. There’s a lot of sheds & outbuildings. Lot of colourful graffiti on walls along the strip. Lot of shiny, fairly recent cars parked. And certainly electricity. There’s a pylon run right alongside of it. And no way is it 14 km. That’d take you into the next province. There’s one area looks like what they may be talking about. Plot 124. Lot of what look like sheds. Bricks on them, holding the roofs on. And someone’s definitely been buggering about with the electric. You can see where they’ve run cables from a pylon. And there’s some fat Arab looking geezer in a frock standing outside. No way’s there’s 4,500 people living there. Unless they’re standing on each other’s shoulders.

  9. Further to the above:
    Looking back along the road, there do seem to be some other plots been taken over by the vermin. But all of them have at least one existing structure on them. Many of them obviously residential. And there do seem to be a lot of plots, most of them, that look legit. Working commercial. Some residences with big gates. Likely those with the pools seen on sat. And you can see lots of aircon units.
    Electricity supply in Spain’s same as UK. One cable. Several suppliers. We recently changed from Endesa to Holaluz. Same electricity, different & cheaper bill. So if you ask a small supplier how many accounts it’s got in the area, it might only have 3. Endesa may have hundreds. But it’ll still have overload problems if there’s more connections than show up on the official figures.
    No, the problems not that they haven’t got electric it’s they don’t want to pay for it. There’ll be something on any plot legitimate for a supply. That’ll be legacy from who owens(ed) the plot. And you don’t need a card to pay it. Take the bill to any bank before 12:00AM & pay cash. They’re also too idle to walk.
    The whole things one of the Graun’s made up sob stories. My virus software had it sussed from the start.

  10. It’s certainly entertaining BiS, that the Guardian should write such a sob story about the horrors of our future green world. But perhaps that’s because the wrong people are suffering.

    I suppose their skins aren’t white enough. Or they don’t go out and work.

  11. They would only steal any cable or anything remote having scrap value, many years ago I recall th story that there was a local council supplied traveller site where they complained the shower block didn’t work, on investigation all the plumbing had been removed

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