Cause and Impact of Power Outage at Woodlands Checkpoint on 9 October 2022

Dr Tan Wu Meng asked the Minister for Home Affairs (a) what is known regarding the root causes of the power outage at Woodlands Checkpoint on 9 October 2022, including the reasons for the reported failure of the backup power generator measures; and (b) what measures are taken to ensure resilience of Singapore's immigration checkpoints against electrical power failures.

Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song asked the Minister for Home Affairs (a) what is the cause of the failure of the backup power generator at Woodlands Checkpoint on 9 October 2022 despite having been serviced and tested the day before; and (b) what measures, including manual workarounds, does the Ministry have in place to ensure that all border checkpoints are able to continue performing their essential functions, including immigration clearance, in the event of an extended power outage.

Mr Speaker, my response will also cover the matters raised in the questions by Mr Shawn Huang1, which are scheduled for a subsequent Sitting. I invite the Member to seek clarifications today, if need be. If the Member feels that his questions are addressed today, it may not be necessary for him to proceed with them during the future Sitting.

Mr Speaker, on 8 October 2022, the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) was conducting a scheduled maintenance of the power source at Woodlands Checkpoint at around 11.40 pm. This timing was chosen as it is, typically, an off-peak period at the checkpoint. As part of the maintenance, the back-up power generator was activated to provide power during this period. However, at 12.20 am on 9 October 2022, the back-up power generator failed, resulting in a power outage that disrupted the checkpoint operations.

The back-up power generator was maintained according to the technical specifications and assessed to be in good working condition during routine weekly and monthly checks, as well as on the day of the scheduled maintenance on 8 October 2022. A full load test on the generator had been conducted in August 2022. In the morning of 8 October 2022, it had been subjected to a 30-minute test-run and was working fine. While the back-up generator has been in operation since 1999, its usage is low. It is only operated when the building power source is undergoing maintenance or during a power failure. It is scheduled for replacement in 2028, according to the specifications.

The cause of the failure of the back-up power generator was a fresh tear in the air duct, causing hot air from the generator to be discharged into the room instead of outside the room. As the hot air re-circulated in the room, the generator engine overheated and shut down. The condition of the air duct was inspected visually and was assessed to be in good condition in the morning of 8 October 2022. As a precautionary measure, ICA will consider if the air duct should be replaced periodically in the future, even if no tears are detected.

There was no data breach or loss during the power outage. The Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system had kicked in, as designed, and provided sufficient time for a proper shutdown of the servers, preventing any data breach or loss.

ICA has put in additional layers of redundancy to protect our operations from power disruptions. There are back-up generators for the main power source. In addition, UPS is provided for key systems to ensure operations continuity if the back-up generators fail. These systems are regularly upgraded during planned maintenance.

For an extended power failure which UPS cannot support, ICA has SOPs in place to ensure operations continuity. This includes activating additional manpower to assist with manual clearance, communicating and advising travellers via multiple channels to avoid non-essential travel and diverting traffic to the other land checkpoint. These contingency plans were activated during this incident.

Prior to this incident, ICA had already planned to further enhance power resiliency at Woodlands and Tuas Checkpoints by building a secondary electrical infrastructure, in addition to the existing one.

Mr Speaker, learning from this incident, ICA will be deploying additional generators as back-ups during future maintenance periods. We will share the lessons learnt from this incident with stakeholders of other critical infrastructure.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I have got two supplementary questions. First, how was immigration clearance conducted during the power outrage? Second, why was it necessary to divert traffic to the Tuas Checkpoint?

Sir, I thank the Member for the supplementary questions. ICA implemented the contingency immigration clearance process, which involves the officers taking down the travellers' details and then, performing back-end security screening, creating the travel records using what we have recorded.

As the clearance rate using the contingency process was significantly slower, an operational decision was made to clear vehicles and travellers who were already on the Causeway travelling towards Woodlands Checkpoint or within the Checkpoint; while ICA worked with the Malaysian authorities to divert the inbound vehicles that had yet to enter the Bangunan Sultan Iskandar Customs, Immigration and Quarantine (CIQ) Complex. So, we diverted those who had not entered the CIQ to the Second Link.

For the outbound vehicles on the Bukit Timah Expressway (BKE) and Woodlands crossings, they were diverted to the Second Link.

We feel that if this was not done, the traffic jam at the Woodlands Checkpoint would have worsened and caused inconvenience to even more travellers.

Mr Speaker, I wish to thank the ICA officers for the hard work that they do under very trying conditions to clear, sometimes, more than 400,000 travellers per day through the checkpoints, every day. I am sure the individual officers are doing their very best and their work is very much appreciated.

However, I would like to ask the Minister of State if there are systemic bottlenecks that ICA can look into to tackle the long waiting times at our land checkpoints. If there are 300,000 travellers a day and each takes one and a half hours to clear immigration, that is 450,000 manhours of productive time lost every day. One observation by travellers is that, sometimes, not all the immigration counters for vehicles are open. I understand, because of limited manpower, ICA dynamically deploys officers to counters in busier zones, leaving counters closed in another zone.

Can I ask the Minister of State, then – can ICA prioritise its recruitment and training of more officers so that all car counters are manned to clear travellers in all zones? And secondly, can ICA increase the number of automated clearance counters for vehicles, especially motorcycles, to relieve some dependence on manned counters?

Sir, I thank the Member for the supplementary questions. These are issues that we continuously look at and which we also train our officers for regularly. In fact, while we were preparing for the reopening and easing of travel, these were things we were doing with our officers.

I want to assure the Member that we are continuing with this process of continuously looking at how to improve how we handle the situation and how we run the operations. Our officers are very committed to doing this because they understand the needs of the people, especially when they are travelling and especially during the peak periods.

Ms Joan Pereira.

Ms Joan Pereira (Tanjong Pagar): Thank you, Speaker. I have one supplementary question. How did ICA ensure that the security of our Woodlands checkpoint was not compromised, that is, that there were no security breaches, such as any illegal or unauthorised entry into Singapore?

Sir, I thank the Member for the supplementary question. Essentially, there were no security breaches, such as illegal or unauthorised entry into Singapore, during the power outage incident.

So, what we did was that during the power outage, our Auxiliary Police Officers (APOs) worked with us and continued to man all critical security posts and access points at Woodlands Checkpoint. And these critical security posts and access points had the emergency lighting. In addition to that, we also provided APOs portable emergency lamps and they guarded these points. Also, we had more security patrols throughout the period of the outage. We are happy that there were no security breaches.

Mr Speaker, I thank the Minister of State for his answer. I have Clementi residents who were concerned at the news of what happened during the power outage. I have got two supplementary questions.

Firstly, would the Minister of State consider, in hindsight, that the generator in use at the time constituted a single point of vulnerability? Because when a back-up generator is deployed as the main ongoing power supply, it is no longer a back-up system.

Secondly, can the Minister of State advise the House on whether there will be a dedicated after action review (AAR), incorporating red team analysis of modes of vulnerability for our key infrastructure at checkpoints and that this will also look at areas, such as cyber risk, electrical supply risk, as well as network cable connectivity risk? Because a system may be compromised through many different possibilities and we have to secure our key infrastructure and checkpoints.

Sir, I thank the Member for the supplementary questions. Yes, we will have the AAR to be undertaken. The risks that were highlighted by the Member are things that we look at, as part of our business continuity plan. In order to do that, agencies work with the critical infrastructure stakeholders and we do have monthly drills that not only look at the issue of power outages. We look at issues that affect our security and incidents that may go beyond power outages. I thank the Member for reminding us on this aspect.

And about the generators, to prevent a recurrence of that incident, ICA will deploy additional generators as further buffers to the existing back-up generators for all subsequent scheduled maintenance work. And, in fact, prior to this incident, ICA had already planned to enhance the power resiliency at Woodlands and Tuas Checkpoints by building a secondary electrical infrastructure by 2028. The works will be carried out in phases because of the complexity of the nature of the works and we also want to carefully plan it, so that we can minimise disruption to ICA's ongoing operations.