Travellers stranded as Lagos airport suffers power outage

The D wing of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, was thrown into darkness in the late hours of Friday owing to power outage.

The incident, which happened around 11pm, left many passengers stranded.

It also affected operations at the airport, including bag offloading, until past midnight, a worker who pleaded anonymity told TheCable.  

The outage was said to have occurred as a result of a generator that packed up.

“The passengers that arrived around 11 pm yesterday because of the power outage, they couldn’t get their bags on time because they had to do manual offloading of the bags,” the worker said.

“Because of the power outage that happened, most of the clients that were supposed to be on D wing were diverted to E wing.”

Confirming the development, Faithful Hope-Ivbaze, acting general manager, corporate affairs of Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), in a statement, apologised to passengers and other airport users who were affected by the outage.

She said the outage was as a “result of yesterday’s rain, that came with very fierce winds and storms, a natural occurrence, affected one of our feeders, and consequently resulted in the temporary disruption of power supply at the D wing of the airport.”

“However, our engineers quickly discovered the fault, and liaised with the Ejigbo duty/area control office of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria and together resolved the problem. Normalcy has since been restored at the affected area,” she said.