Miriam Defensor-Santiago opens up about the 5-hour outage in NAIA
Presidential candidate and senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago said that the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) may regain the “world’s worst airport” following the 5-hour power outage that occurred over the weekend. The incident has cancelled and delayed over 100 fights, both domestic and international.
The power interruption has affected more than 15,000 passengers in NAIA terminal 3 and has resulted to chaos. It started at around 8:40 pm on Saturday until 2:00 am the next day, Sunday.
In a report by GMA News Online, the author of best-selling book “Stupid Is Forever” urged the Aquino administration to investigate the incident and do something to prevent the outage from happening again.
“The Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA) seems eager to regain the ‘world’s worst airport’ title which it lost only in 2015, not only for inconveniencing passengers, but for not working as it should,” she said.
The busiest airport in the country, NAIA was tagged as the world’s worst airport from 2011 and 2013 and came fourth in 2014. It was ranked by the website Guide to Sleeping in Airports, which assess airports based on its comfort and convenience.
According to Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA), the power outage occurred when a substation of Manila Electric Company (Meralco) tripped at around 8:45 pm. However, they denied the allegations, saying that the sudden malfunction was restored in less than a minute. They said that “trouble on the customer’s loadside” could have caused the outage.
The MIAA has already apologized to passengers following the incident. They noted that they will do everything that they can to avoid such incident to happen again.