The Manila Electric Co. (MERALCO) admitted an oversight in procedure among its personnel that caused a power interruption at the Terminal 3 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) last Friday.
“We would like to apologize for the inconvenience the power interruption last Friday caused,” MERALCO spokesperson Joe Zaldarriaga said in a statement.
MERALCO’s incident report to airport authorities said that an unintentional oversight occurred during a testing activity conducted by an MServ personnel – where grounding conductors were accidentally left attached to electrical equipment.
As a result, an electrical fault transpired at 12:50 pm, leading to the subsequent power interruption at the facilities of NAIA-3 on June 9.
“The affected facilities were immediately isolated, and power was restored at 1:29 p.m of the same day. MERALCO also dispatched crew on site to assist MServ and MIAA,” Zaldarriaga added.
In addition, he mentioned that the incident report contains recommendations to ensure smoother audit and testing procedures for future activities at the NAIA 3 facilities has been submitted to the airport authorities.
The company provided assurance to the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA), the Department of Transportation (DOTr), and the public that measures are being taken to prevent the recurrence of such incidents in the future.
“We remain committed to working with the government in its transportation infrastructure development efforts,” Zaldarriaga said.
The recent power interruption took place a little over a month after the extended outage on May 1st and five months following the NAIA technical issue that disrupted travel for numerous passengers on New Year’s Day
