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Power Outage Strands Thousands at US Airport. 600 Flights Cancelled (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
A power outage at the world's busiest airport left thousands of passengers stranded in dark terminals and in planes sitting on the tarmac, amid a nationwide ground stop. Incoming and outgoing flights at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport were halted indefinitely as crews worked to restore power, leading to hundreds of flight delays and cancellations. Atlanta is the heart of the US air transport system, and what happens there has the potential to ripple through the country.
More than 600 flights to and from Atlanta have been canceled, including 350 departures, according to Flightradar24... Flights headed to Atlanta are being held on the ground at their departure airport. Inbound flights to Atlanta are being diverted, US Customs and Border Protection said. Departures from the airport are delayed because electronic equipment is not working in the terminals, the FAA said. The cause of the incident is under investigation.
Some people stranded in the dark terminals used their cellphones as flashlights, one passenger told CNN. "There were a few emergency lights on, but it was really dark -- felt totally apocalyptic."
More than 600 flights to and from Atlanta have been canceled, including 350 departures, according to Flightradar24... Flights headed to Atlanta are being held on the ground at their departure airport. Inbound flights to Atlanta are being diverted, US Customs and Border Protection said. Departures from the airport are delayed because electronic equipment is not working in the terminals, the FAA said. The cause of the incident is under investigation.
Some people stranded in the dark terminals used their cellphones as flashlights, one passenger told CNN. "There were a few emergency lights on, but it was really dark -- felt totally apocalyptic."
It seems odd than an airport is so unprepared for a power outage. I'd have thought they would have enough backup generators to run essential systems. As far as fuel goes, jet fuel would likely run in at least some diesel generators.
Sure you have to divide up the circuits so you can run essential systems, or go around and turn a bunch of stuff off. You'd need emergency lighting 24/7 at minimum and at least all the computers and security equipment.
Sure that level of redundancy is not cheap, but in a national emergency we need air travel to work. Whatever the issue is, it needs fixed.
What happened to backup generators? You would think that such crucial infrastructure system would have backup generators to run important systems.
yup. atlanta. mainly due to the hub-and-spoke structure of commercial airline routes. this is delta's primary hub for the eastern half of the country.
more passengers fly through atlanta than any other airport in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
and also busiest when measured by number if aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And John McClain just tweeted that he's about to pick his wife up from the airport!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
ATL is busier than all of those every day *Yes, including JFK). MIA is much smaller.
Some folks with no love for the US have been experimenting lately. A recent incident involved corrupting some systems intended to prevent wide-scale power interruptions. One wonders if this was simply a proof-of-concept operation. One hopes this is thoroughly investigated. Not just written off as embarrassing.
It shouldn't be this way.
Someone should tell all the travelers that they need to arrive in the U.S. from some other direction.
Exactly! If it had been implemented as a router, it would have been much more effective!
A backup system limits the common points of failure with the primary system. While there are plenty of airports with co-generation plants that can backfeed the primary utility circuits supporting the airport, this is generally not considered a backup system. (LAX has about 20MW of generation in their central plant, but IIRC it doesn't have black-start capability, as an example.)
Airports have the benefit of being big; generally, a properly designed system will maintain reduced operations under failure conditions. It won't eliminate an incident, but it can drastically reduce the impact of a major problem. You can sacrifice a concourse, but you limit the impact on other concourses so you can keep moving in the degraded state.
I was stuck at Hartsfield for 11 hours last week thanks to the snowstorm that hit Atlanta.
The snow wasn't all that bad. The problem was that the planes had to be deiced before they could take off. Hartsfield only has 4 de-icing pads. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to de-ice a regional jet, about an hour to de-ice one of the heavies. I was listening to ground control pretty much the entire time (thank you LiveATC app), and it was a mess. Pilots weren't responding to directions properly, creating an even bigger traffic jam. There was no clear order in which the planes were going to be de-iced, it was decided by the airlines based on priority of flight and the order wasnt always communicated to the ground control tower, so the ground controllers couldn't even line them up in the order they were going to be de-iced. This combined with the lack of speed to de-ice the planes led to a number of flights having to return to the gate in order to avoid tripping over the 3 hour rule. This also resulted in other flights not pushing back from the gates, since once they close that cabin door, the 3 hour countdown begins. Incoming flights were delayed or cancelled because there weren't gates open for their passengers, and since inbound flights were getting cancelled, outbound flights were as well since the planes that would be servicing those outbound flights were no longer inbound.
It became apparent to me that this wasn't a weather problem. It was a major inefficiency in airline operations. Yeah, I know, it's Georgia (I lived in the Atlanta metro area for over 2 decades) and it doesn't snow that often, but you'd think the busiest airport in the US would be better equipped to handle something like de-icing planes, especially given the ripple effect that disruptions at Hartsfield has on not just US transport, but globally as well. The international disruption isn't that bad, those flights can be diverted pretty easily, but domestic flight? There aren't any nearby airports that are even close to capable of handling the load that Hartsfield does.
And then today there's a major power outage that disrupts one of the busiest travel weekends of the year.
Maybe now they'll pay attention and revamp Hartsfield's operations so that it doesn't fuck everyone plans up.
The electrical fire's intensity damaged two substations serving the airport, including the airport's "redundant system" that should have provided backup power, Reed said.
Am I the only one who finds it strange that two supposedly redundant systems are housed under the same roof, or at least so close together that both of them can be damaged by the same fire? At my last employer, we duplicated stuff that is far less critical over 2 buildings located at a good distance from each other...
Referring to 40 MW as "backup power" is a bit ridiculous. That's a whole new powerplant right there.
What's your point? A major transportation hub like Atlanta easily does enough commerce to justify a standby power plant. Heck, power companies maintain these already for times of need. Wouldn't be hard to work out a deal to share the cost.
Anyway, it looks like there was a fire which not only cut power but also damaged some of the backup systems.
If one fire can damage the backup systems then they weren't really backup systems now were they?