Kipchumba Murkomen, the transport minister in Kenya had asked for pardon on Saturday, August 26 after an extensive electricity blackout yesterday night, left passengers at the main airport in Nairobi, stranded and struggling in the darkness.
Electricity had gone off in several parts of the country at 9.45 p.m. (6:45pm GMT) on Friday, August 25, according to reports by the electricity distribution company, Kenya Power. They had also blamed the outage on a system disturbance.
Online footage seen from local broadcaster NTV, showed passengers clustered around the main terminal at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, JKIA, in the dark. A few people had used their mobile phone flashlight to light their way.
Kenya Airports Authority, KAA, had revealed that one of its stand-by generators (supposed to serve the terminal) had failed to start after the grid went off.
Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen had however said in a televised news conference that the generators serving the flight control tower and the airport runway were always functional, adding that no travellers nor aircraft were put in harms way by the outage.
Murkomen’s apology read:
“I wish to apologize unreservedly, to all travellers and airport users who were in one way or another, affected by the power disruption.”
National airline, Kenya Airways had at the time of filing this report, not responded immediately to requests for comment.
Kenya Power had meanwhile, stated that it had restored supply to the airport five hours after the outage began.
But several homes and businesses had still gone without electricity more than 15 hours after the blackout began.
