The Nigerian government has denied reports of an earthquake at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos.
The Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria said on Sunday that the vibration experienced at the airport last week was as a result of unlatched doors in the air handling room.
Henrietta Yakubu, acting general manager, corporate affairs of FAAN, said in a statement that the vibration occurred directly under the office of Royal Air Maroc and that led to the wrong assumption that something was wrong.
“Well first and foremost it is wrong and erroneous that the structure of the Murtala Muhammed Airport is failing and there was earthquake as reported by some sections of the media,” the statement said.
“It is not so; what happened is that there was vibrations at the air handling room of the cooling system, this door is a huge metal door that needs to be locked properly (and) it was locked but it wasn’t latched properly, the latches were not in place and that gave rise to the vibration because there are moving parts, there are motors and fans and other things that are activated and they function the motion to create the necessary cooling system,” it said.
“Once our men were alerted, they went promptly, identified the problem which was the door, and latched the door and since then there had been quiet, so it’s not true,” the statement said.
Commenting further, FAAN said the airport’s engineering department was working on the chillers too.
“We are working on those chillers and in no distant time the airport will be quite chilled and comfortable for our passengers,” he noted.
On the issue of the power outage that was reported, the statement said dedicated generators were used during the period of outage.
“Indeed there was power outage at the airport; however we have dedicated generators to certain areas of the airport and those generators were working at the time we lost the power.
“The airfield lighting, taxiways were all working perfectly and most part of the operational aspects of the airport including the checking-in counter was working perfectly.
“The terminal building where passengers found themselves was affected but the outage did not get to the critical safety operations of the airport and even that it took us a couple of minutes to identify the problem and we went for it.
“The generators that would power that unit had surges and destroyed part of the activation system of the generators and took time to restore but it has been restored now and since then everything is working normally.”
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