Fire guts Medan airport’s arrival hall
An early morning fire swept through Polonia Airport’s international arrival hall in Medan, North Sumatra, on Thursday, disrupting scheduled arrivals and causing financial losses estimated in billions of rupiah.
Nobody was hurt in the fire, which is believed to have been caused by an electrical short circuit at about 3:30 a.m.
The fire, which was extinguished within half an hour, disrupted several scheduled incoming flights.
Services returned to normal at 11 a.m., with arriving flights and passengers shifted to the departure hall.
The operations and technical director of airport management company PT Angkasa Pura II, I.G.M. Dordi, said the decision to cancel landings was made for security reasons because all the immigration data in the hall was destroyed.
“In the meantime, services for passengers arriving from abroad were conducted in an emergency situation. We used the international departure hall to check all of the incoming passengers,” said Dordi, who did not say when the hall would reopen.
Deputy chief of North Sumatra Police, Brig. Gen. Rubani Pranoto, said there was no initial indication of arson although the investigation into the cause continued.
He said the fire began in a waiting room and spread throughout the hall, but he did not believe it was connected to long delayed plans to relocate the international airport to Kuala Namu dating back to 1991.
The fire was the latest in a series of accidents at the 144-hectare airport, located in a heavily populated area, which accommodates 150 flights a day and was first opened in 1936. A fault in the runway illumination system forced the airport to close for several hours in August last year. The airport also has only one runway for takeoffs and landings, and there have been several fatal crashes in recent years, most recently a Mandala Airlines flight that crashed on takeoff in September 2005, killing 147 people. (JP/Apriadi Gunawan)