Blackout paralyses airport operations

Communication equipment at the Moi International Airport was extensively damaged by power failure that plunged the entire country into darkness on Monday night.

“The more than 10 powerful outages caused a lot of damage to communication equipment at the airport,” a source at the airport said.
The source said operations at the country’s second biggest airport were paralysed.

However, the blackout did not disrupt activities at Coast Provincial General Hospital because the institution has a standby generator, the deputy administrator, Dr Hilton Jilo said.

“We normally have a generator on standby and Monday’s blackout did not affect us much,” he said. The Kenya Power and Lighting Company on Tuesday confirmed that there had been a major power failure around midnight.

Five hours

Kenya Power and Lighting Company’s Coast manager for corporate communications and marketing, Mr Bomba Mahaga, told journalists in Mombasa that the power failure was caused by a technical problem on the supply lines from Uganda.

He said power was restored on Tuesday at 5.15am. “It is true that there was a blackout that lasted about five hours after a mechanical problem at Lanet in Nakuru that affected power supply throughout the country,” he said.

On whether the power distributor would pay compensation for losses caused by the blackout, Mr Mahaga said that what happened on Monday was an emergency and there would be no need to pay for any loss.

In any case, he maintained, institutions that provided essential services like the airport should have contingency measures in place.

“We are not able at the moment to quantify the damage or loss resulting from the power outage but we would like to apologise to our customers,” Mr Mahaga said.