The Murtala Mohammed International
Airport, Lagos was thrown into darkness on Tuesday and Wednesday due to a burnt
power cable.
Findings on Wednesday revealed that
some facilities such as the chillers were not functioning at the airport due to
the problem.
As a result of the power cut,
airlines operating from the international terminal resorted to manual check-in
of passengers as all their systems packed up.
Also, profilers resorted to the use
of torchlight to authenticate the profile of departing passengers, while
workers on the fifth floor of the airport also had to use torchlight to access
their offices.
The outage affected the two foreign
carriers, which landed simultaneously on Wednesday evening at the airport, Air
France and Lufthansa Airlines.
It also led to delays at the baggage
reclaim area as arriving passengers spent over an hour before they could
retrieve their luggage.
However, in a statement on Wednesday,
the General Manager, Corporate Communications, Federal Airports Authority of
Nigeria, Mr. Yakubu Dati, said power supply had been restored.
He said power was restored on
Wednesday.
Dati said in the statement, “The
power outage, which mostly affected the ‘E’ Wing of the terminal, was caused by
an underground armoured cable fault, leading to billowing of smoke in the
affected area.
“The outage did not affect operations
at the terminal, but some services were temporarily shut down to enable our
engineers effect repairs to the damaged cables.
“FAAN regrets any inconvenience the
brief power outage caused airline passengers and operators at the terminal, and
we wish to assure the public that such power outage will soon become a thing of
the past when the power improvement project at the airport, involving the
installation of six ultra modern generators, is inaugurated.”
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