By Kenneth Ehigiator, Lawani Mikairu & Daniel Eteghe

ON Tuesday night in Lagos, nature barred its fangs as the storm that accompanied the heavy downpour of the night in some parts of the metropolis left destruction in its wake.  Road traffic was grounded, commuters were stranded at bus stops and those who managed to get vehicles to their destinations spent hours on the road. Many did not get to their homes until the following morning.

The devastation was even more pronounced in the aviation sector due to flight disruptions. Flights were delayed and aircraft already in the air were diverted to alternative airports to land to avert disaster. This is because the storm had already impacted negatively on electricity supply to the Murtala Muhammed Airport, making it impossible for any aircraft to take off and land.

Emirates flight from Dubai which was on its way to land at the airport had to be diverted to Lome, Togo, as the Lagos airport was in pitch darkness. It is not immediately clear if navigational equipment were damaged by the storm but the weather element disrupted flight operations into and out of the airport.

Industry regulator, Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, NCAA, had always advised pilots to adhere to weather reports from Nigerian Meteorological Agency, NIMET, especially at this time of year when such debilitating weather phenomena as windshear, microburst and thunderstorm hover around airports.   

Aside from direct power source from Power Holdings Company of Nigeria, PHCN, the airport in Lagos is also connected to two standby automatic generators, which should set off when power from the electricity company goes off. This did not happen because the generator was also submerged in the flood that trailed the rainfall.

But spokesman of Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, Mr Yakubu Datti, said in a statement, yesterday, that the outage at the airport was due to power surge from the power company.  In the past such power surges had damaged sensitive navigational facilities as Instrument Landing System, ILS, and radar systems.

According to Datti, the incident only occurred for about six minutes before power was fully restored to the airport. He explained: “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. Our 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.”

Departing flights
He further explained that all departing flights were delayed for about 30 minutes, to enable FAAN engineers rectify the faults in the generators before full power supply was later restored to the airport leading to resumption of all operations.

Vanguard investigation revealed that the outage prevented United Airlines, Delta and Air France passengers who were already on ground before the rain started from disembarking from the plane until power and normalcy were restored. It was gathered that the power improvement project at the airport which would eliminate incidents such as this had been completed and is being test run, preparatory to formal commissioning by the airports authorities.

Although what happened last Tuesday was a natural phenomenon which was nobody’s fault, it is, however, an indication of what level of disruptions weather would cause airline operations in the country this year, and the need for the authorities to be prepared for the occurrence. Power outage at the Lagos airport had been a recurring decimal as the airports authorities had not been able to really put a seal to the problem.

Last year, the airport suffered an outage that last for over thirty minutes, following collapse of both sources of power supply, prompting both local and international airlines to divert to alternate airports, while those on ground were temporarily grounded. A similar incident occurred two years ago. The Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja is not insulated from this problem as airlines have suffered a similar fate at the airport.