A rainstorm on Monday night cut off public power supply to Nigeria’s main gateway Murtala Muhammed International Airport in the economic capital city of Lagos, delaying departing and arriving flights, according to the spokesman for the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), Yakubu Dati.
Dati said the rainstorm also affected the standby generator at the airport, thus plunging the facility into darkness that lasted up to 30 minutes.
He said full power supply was later restored to the airport and that all operations resumed ”in earnest”, without saying exactly when.
”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 minutes of power outage,” the FAAN spokesman said.
He said FAAN engineers had to switch over to the airport’s standby generators, but added: ”Unfortunately some panels of the standby generators had been 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.”
