“This flight is being diverted to Catania airport in Sicily because of a nationwide power blackout in Malta.” Imagine being on a flight to Malta and that announcement coming over the PA system. What would you think? It sounds like a joke, like a bad excuse. You’d immediately think ‘terrorist attack’ or ‘bomb on board’ or ‘hijack’ and the captain is trying to keep everybody cool with the best thing he can come up with.

And the passengers, when they realised it was actually the truth, couldn’t have been terribly amused. After battling your way to the airport after a day at work, through the airport, sitting on that plane for at least three hours and then hoping to get off at the other end and fling yourself straight under the shower, you find yourself dumped at one of the ugliest airports in Europe, Catania, where there is absolutely nothing to do, sitting around waiting for the lights to switch back on in Malta.

There used to be a joke about Labour being elected, back when switching to voting for the reds was distinctly the opposite of smart: will the last one out turn out the lights. I thought of that on Tuesday night, as I turned a table in a hotel coffee shop into my desk surrounded by what seemed to be half of Malta holding business meetings, killing time and shooting the breeze with family and friends in what appeared to be the only source of light, wireless internet and air-conditioning in the north of the island.

Driving through the pitch-black back roads (the remains of last Sunday’s super moon came in useful) and seeing no pinpricks of light in the distance anywhere, I thought that this is what things must have been like in Victorian times.

I overheard somebody say “They’re trying to prove their point that we really, really need another power station and that big gas thing moored in the harbour.” But no, of course it wasn’t anything like that. It was just a major mess-up, and unfortunately nobody will be suing Enemalta for damages, no matter how much that mess-up cost them.

All those flights diverted to Catania will have cost the airlines a pretty penny. The fuel to run a generator powerful enough to keep a massive five-star hotel going smoothly for several hours, with lifts, air-conditioning, light and kitchens, costs a small fortune.

Then there are all those hours of lost work: restaurants losing business in the peak month of the year, when they can ill afford to, is just a part of it. Had the power blown during the day, when shops, factories, offices, banks and other businesses are routinely open, the loss to productivity over that many hours would have been unquantifiable.

Power was restored fully throughout Malta an unbelievable 18 hours after it blew on Tuesday night. Enemalta’s CEO told the press that the disaster was caused when the cable feeding the Marsa distribution centre “was damaged”. This caused transformers to explode, he said, even cracking the surface of some roads. The Delimara and Marsa power plants then shut down automatically for safety, and the nationwide blackout was the result.

The interesting thing is that, until the point at which I sat down to write this late yesterday afternoon, the press and the public had not been given the most essential information: what caused the damage to that cable, triggering off the chain of chaos. That is what we really want to know.

Instead we had lots of talk about how this wasn’t due to a surge in demand because Enemalta has the capacity to produce as much electricity as the public could possibly demand (ah, so why all this fuss about a new power station, then).

I would have liked to see the Energy Minister, mobbed by a crowd of reporters and cameramen, but apparently that sort of treatment is reserved for far less important people on far less important matters, like car crashes and similar.

He was all over the place shouting ‘Shame on you’ in the electoral campaign, always very keen to face the camera with some fresh accusations against those who are now his predecessors. Now that he is in government and the person responsible for dealing with all this, he is not so keen on the cameras, not at all delighted at the sight of a reporter’s microphone – not that many reporters are fighting to get a microphone under his nose.

I suppose if he opens his front door to find a persistent reporter on the step, accompanied by a man carrying a rolling camera, Konrad Mizzi could always take a tip out of his wife’s book and play the sympathy card by holding back the tears. That should make for quite a sight.

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