Some medium-voltage poles and wires were buried by soil when workers were leveling the ground for the Long Thanh International Airport project in Long Thanh District, Dong Nai Province, southern Vietnam, resulting in more than 70 households experiencing a day-long blackout on Saturday.

The affected households were left without power for more than 24 hours, according to many local residents’ accounts as of 6:00 pm on Sunday.

The electricity only came back after the power network was reconnected at around 8:15 pm on the same day.

Previously, the Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) issued a document requiring the relocation of the power line in question before construction workers poured soil from eight to 10 meters high to raise the foundation of the Long Thanh International Airport project, which is located in Long Thanh District, some 40 kilometers from Ho Chi Minh City.

The VND336.63 trillion (US$14.28 billion) project, planned to be the largest airport in Vietnam upon completion, will cover around 5,000 hectares of land and was designed to have an annual capacity of 100 million passengers and five million metric tons of cargo. 

While the ACV requirement was not met, the local residents of two villages in Long Thanh District reported a mass outage to the Long Thanh Power Corporation at 11:15 am on Saturday.

A Long Thanh Power Corporation team of employees then patrolled the affected area and found that eight medium-voltage poles and wires were buried in soil by ground-leveling vehicles, with four of them completely covered, leading to the large-scale outage.

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