The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) has attributed the power outages that took place at the international terminal of the Murtala Muhammed Airport on Monday night and paralysed facilitation activities to thunderstorm.

In a statement signed by the General Manager, Corporate Communications, Yakubu Dati, the agency explained that disruption of power supply from the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) led to surge, which caused the outages that happened three times; the last one lasting over an hour in some parts of the terminal.

But the agency said it has provided a permanent solution to such interruptions as its alternative and secondary source of power project would soon come on stream.

“The airport is connected to two main power sources from Ejigbo and Egbin power stations. The storm initially knocked off the power supply from Ejigbo, which led to a three-minute outage at the airport before our engineers switched over to the alternate power supply source from Egbin. That supply line was later affected by the storm, leading to another three minute power outage,” FAAN explained.

Dati said that FAAN’s engineers “then switched over to the airport’s standby generators, some panels of which were unfortunately soaked with water, due to the heavy flooding that resulted from the heavy rainfall.

“This resulted in a blackout at the ‘E’ wing of the airport, including the avio bridges. It was for this reason that arriving passengers on an international flight were processed through an alternative route at the terminal and in the process, were exposed momentarily to the rain,” he said.

The agency also acknowledged that all departing flights were also delayed for about 30 minutes, “to enable our engineers rectify the faults in the generators. Full power supply was later restored to the airport and all operations resumed in earnest. There were no accidents or injuries to anybody at the airport as a result of the power outage.”

Dati disclosed that the power improvement project at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, which would eliminate incidents such as this at the airport, has been completed and is being test run, preparatory to the formal launching of the project.
“The Authority sincerely apologises to all airport users, especially passengers and airline operators, for that power outage and deeply regrets any inconvenience caused them, as a result of the incident,” the statement said.

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