Nairobi - Several regions of Kenya went without power on Friday and Saturday in outages that also left Nairobi International Airport in darkness for several hours.
Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) reported "a system disturbance leading to a loss of bulk power supply to various parts of the country" starting Friday night. Apart from the capital, with a population of five million, the main cities affected in the East African nation included Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, and Eldoret.
By midday on Saturday, KPLC said power had been restored to most of the regions, but several areas of the capital and Mombasa, the second-largest city, were reportedly still without electricity.
At Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta airport, one of Africa's busiest hubs, the Kenya Airport Authority said a generator serving the main terminals had failed to restart after the outage. KPLC said the airport supply had returned at 3:00 a.m. (0000 GMT). No information had been released on how the outage affected flight departure and arrivals. Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen took to X, formerly Twitter, to declare:
"There is no excuse worth reporting and there is no reason why our airport is in darkness." str-sva/bp/js
Kenya's transport minister apologized to the country late on Friday night after a widespread electricity blackout left passengers at the main airport in Nairobi grappling in darkness.
The airport operator Kenya Airports Authority said that one of its stand-by generators at the facility did not kick in. "I'm really sorry for what has happened at the JKIA with the blackout," Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen said on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
"There is no excuse worth reporting and there is no reason why our airport is in darkness." It was not immediately clear how the lack of power at the airport, a key gateway for leisure and business travelers into the continent, affected flights. Officials at national airline Kenya Airways were not immediately available for comment.
Kenya Power said it had restored supply to the airport, five hours after the incident began. Many homes and businesses were still without power more than 12 hours after the blackout started. While widespread power outages do happen in Kenya, it is rare for the blackouts to affect operations at the airport, with no reports of such incidents in recent memory.
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