Gozo Dark: Enemalta Left an Island Without Power
The Meteorological Office has issued an Orange Weather Warning as Malta moves through its second heatwave of the season, with forecast temperatures reaching or exceeding 38°C and a feels-like reading approaching 46°C.
Gozo spent a night in the dark, and nobody in a position of authority seemed particularly embarrassed about it. According to Times of Malta and Newsbook, two major faults — one in Xewkija, one near Comino — knocked out power across the sister island, with Enemalta falling back on generators while repairs were carried out. For the people who lived through it, the explanation was beside the point. What mattered was the heat.
And the heat, on a night like that, is not a minor inconvenience. The Meteorological Office has issued an Orange Weather Warning as Malta moves through its second heatwave of the season, with forecast temperatures reaching or exceeding 38°C and a feels-like reading approaching 46°C. Forty-six degrees. In a blackout. On an island where air conditioning is no longer a luxury but a medical necessity for the elderly and the vulnerable. I will not dress that up: someone made a decision somewhere about infrastructure investment, and Gozo is paying the price for it in darkness and sweat.
Enemalta has pledged to use generators until the faults are fully repaired. That is the kind of sentence that sounds like reassurance and functions as confession. Generators are what you reach for when the system you were supposed to maintain has failed. They are the emergency measure that, in Malta, has a tendency to become the permanent solution.
The Church meanwhile is providing its own kind of heat. The Lisa Marie Foundation, which supports survivors of abuse, has responded with fury to Bishop Anton Teuma's decision not to sanction a Gozo priest, calling his words "insulting" to the very people the diocese should be protecting. Teuma has been bishop long enough to know that silence and inaction in abuse cases do not read as pastoral restraint — they read as institutional protection. The foundation's use of the word "shocked" is polite. I am not shocked. I have watched this Church navigate these situations for four decades, and the pattern is consistent enough to be called a policy.
Elsewhere, a Labour MP is calling for dedicated noise legislation and nationally standardised quiet hours — a proposal that, on paper, is entirely reasonable and, in practice, will take years to move through a parliament that has five overlapping laws on the subject and no appetite for consolidating them. Franco Mercieca makes the philosophical case in Times of Malta that quietness deserves legal protection. He is right. He is also writing about an island that approved a Hard Rock Hotel and calls the cranes progress.
What connects a powerless Gozo, a Church that protects its own, and a parliament debating noise while the infrastructure creaks is the same thing that always connects things here: the gap between what is announced and what is delivered. The generators will eventually stop. The heat will not wait.
*Gabriel Fenech is Senior Correspondent for News Beast by FreeMalta.com.*
