5-hr power outage delays flights, strands thousands; looting in the dark reported

The Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 3 (NAIA-3) was temporarily shut down for five hours beginning Saturday night due to a power outage that caused massive flight delays, stranding thousands of passengers, and resulting to reports of looting in the dark.

NAIA-3 officials said that a sub-station of the Manila Electric Company (Meralco) at NAIA tripped, causing Terminal 3 to lose power at 8:40 p.m. The lights went back on at 9:25 p.m., the power went out again at 9:47 p.m.

Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA) Senior Assistant General Manager Vicente Guerzon said that by 12:30 a.m. Sunday, electricity was partially restored with the use of generators.

NAIA-3 Manager Octavio Lina said they placed all generators available on operations, but they were limited only to powering airport lights and air-conditioning systems.

At 2 a.m., airport electricity was fully restored and normal operations at the airport resumed, said Guerzon.

The check-in counters were also unusable as another power outage struck the terminal around 5 a.m.

It was only at 7:18 a.m. that restless passengers waiting outside NAIA-3 were allowed to enter inside and operations were fully restored.

International airlines that were affected were the Cathay Pacific flights, Singapore Airlines, KLM, Emirates, Philippine Airlines  (PAL) Express and Cebu Pacific Air that have to cancel their 24 domestic flights due to power outage.

Cebu Pacific blamed the incident for a total of 78 of its one-way flights being cancelled, and approximately 13,950 passengers stranded.

Passengers of the cancelled flights, and all other guests who were not able to take their flights from April 2, 2016 (8:30 p.m.) to April 3, 2016 (11:59 p.m.), were also provided the option to rebook, refund, or convert their flights into travel fund, without penalties.

In a statement, PAL said the incident resulted in the delay of 72 flights.

Affected air carriers were coordinating with the MIAA and the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in resolving the situation with all guests of the disrupted flights.

LONG QUEUES

But before power was fully restored, the situation was nearly chaotic as security guards prevented passengers from coming into the terminal, causing much confusion and stranding of thousands of passengers at the vehicle bay areas.

NAIA-3 officials said their actions were necessary to maintain security inside the airport and not to congest the departure area. Traffic, though, extended from the vehicle bay all the way to the roads leading to the airport.

Inside Terminal 3, the counters swelled with passengers scrambling to verify their flights and luggage.

Elderly passengers suffered the most due to the long queues at the check-in counter.

“Many senior citizens were not accommodated at the elevator they were forced to climb the stairs particularly at departure gate,” Tacloban-bound passenger Candy Buenaventura said. “Delayed na nga daw pinahihirapan pa sila (Their flights were already delayed still they were made to suffer).”

LOOTING IN THE DARK

Some “balikbayan” passengers who were stranded could not help but express their anger and disappointment as their luggage were opened during the brownout.

Cecilio Gresos, one of the passengers from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania said, he discovered that his two luggages were opened. Upon checking, he saw that some of his valuables were already missing.

Gresos said he lost two of his cellphones. Even the contents of his padlocked red bag were missing, he said.

Gresos relayed that he overheard that a female passenger also lost some pairs of shoes while another man was able to retrieve his missing bag but it had been ruined.

‘LOADSIDE PROBLEM’

The blackouts that caused flight diversions and which practically stalled arrival and departure processes for passengers was a “loadside problem,” according to Meralco.

This means it was the system at the airport that encountered some snags.

Meralco said there had been a momentary snap on a sub-station but everything returned to normal on their side; and that power was being supplied sufficiently to the airport’s load.

Meralco Spokesman Joe Zaldarriaga said “the loadside problem happened after a substation tripping, but power supply got back immediately after 45 seconds.”

The power supply at NAIA-3, however, failed to be brought back following the incident and that their generator system also failed to work.

“Based on our assessment, the power interruptions that occurred was apparently due to problems in NAIA’s internal electrical facilities,” Zaldarriaga has emphasized.

He added that “Meralco was able to detect the trouble that caused the tripping and responded immediately.”

On April 1 Meralco announced that maintenance schedules from 11:30 pm of April 2 until 4:30 am of April 3 would affect a “portion of NAIA Road from Domestic Road to near Electrical Road in Pasay City.” But Meralco has not issued any statement associating it with the incident.

Presidential Communications Operations Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr. assured that transport authorities are addressing the situation at NAIA-3

Coloma said in coordination with airlines, passengers on canceled flights are being accommodated in hotels while awaiting new flight departures.

APOLOGIES, APOLOGIES

MIAA Spokesperson David de Castro apologized to the affected passengers for the inconvenience that the brownout had caused them.

De Castro added that the terminal has 10 generator sets but these cannot supply the required electricity that the terminal needed to resume its operations. These were only used to switch on the emergency lights at Terminal 3.

He also said that the power temporarily went back around 12 a.m. but they opted to use it to charge the nine generator sets which were used to light up some parts of the terminal.

Guerzon also said echoed apologies to inconvenienced passengers and assured that “measures are now being worked out to make sure that a power outage does not occur again in the future.”

For his part, Lina said: “I am very thankful to all airline personnel at the check-in counters, immigration, customs and members of the Office of Transport Security (OTS) who stood behind us despite of darkness, they still there for us entertaining passengers while airport and aviation policemen are dispatched in all areas of the airport giving security to all passengers inside the terminal.”

BI: FORGETTABLE NIGHT

Even for Bureau of Immigration (B I) employees on duty during the brownout, the situation was a forgettable and unpleasant experience.

Informed sources at the BI port operations division told the Manila Bulletin that for nearly six hours, personnel manning the NAIA 3 immigration arrival counters had to manually process passengers while those assigned at the departure counters had to wait for power to be restored before processing travelers going abroad.

The experience was more traumatic for the departing passengers and their immigration inspectors, however.

Unlike arriving passengers who were immediately cleared by immigration inspectors, the departing ones had to crowd themselves and wait outside the entrance to the immigration departure area starting at 8:20 pm when the brownout occurred until about 2:20 am when power returned.

NAIA-BI officials warned that power outages of these kind could pose a risk to the country’s security as the manual processing of arriving foreigners meant that computers that could detect an alien who is in the bureau’s blacklist of undesirable aliens are not functioning.

PASSENGERS’ IRE

A number of passengers vented their ire and frustration on Twitter over the five-hour brownout resulting to flight delays and cancellations, the latest travel chaos that hit NAIA.

In a tweet, one of the passengers named Gay Coral, remarked, “We’ve been parked in the tarmac for 43 minutes now. Pilots have no communication with tower, we’re told.”

Another passenger, Artur, blamed the MIAA for “doing nothing” while the airport had no power.

“No update from the airport, people are lying on the ground, no free drinks,” he said.

The power problem was serious enough to prompt departure planes not to leave the airport since they had no contact with the wrap control to assign them in their respective terminal bays.

Despite their arrival, passengers also were stuck inside their planes for hours because the planes had to be manually towed to any free terminal bay before they were allowed to disembark.

A staff from the airport’s Media Affairs Division said that arriving passengers were offloaded in other available terminals such as Terminal 4. (With reports from Roy C. Mabasa, James Loyola, Myrna M. Velasco, Jun Ramirez, Raymund F. Antonio, Genalyn D. Kabiling, and Alexander Lopez)

Source:
courtesy of MANILA BULLETIN

by Ariel Fernandez And Argyll Cyrus B. Geducos

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