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Atlanta’s Airport Has Power Again, but Many Passengers Are Stranded Atlanta’s Airport Has Power Again, but Many Passengers Are Stranded
(35 minutes later)
ATLANTA — The lights were back on at the world’s busiest airport Monday, and after Sunday’s blackout, it was busier than usual — a lot busier. Hundreds of passengers whose flights were canceled Sunday were jammed into lines that snaked toward distant ticket counters. ATLANTA — The lights were back on at the world’s busiest airport on Monday, but ticket counters were jammed with hundreds of passengers looking for a way out, after an intense electrical fire blacked the airport out for much of Sunday. Though the fire caused no injuries, it exposed flaws in a system whose temporary failure was felt by travelers around the globe.
The predominant feelings were resignation, frustration and anger. At the south terminal, a Delta employee with a chipper Australian accent pushed around a cart offering free Krispy Kreme doughnuts and bottled water. The fire at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport had not only knocked out the airport’s primary power source, it also prevented the backup system from kicking in. “The fire was so intense, so hot, that it caused a switching system, which switches to the backup, to malfunction,” the mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed, said in a news conference.
And while most passengers kept their game faces on, it seemed there was not enough sugar in the world to assuage the overall sense of dislocation and annoyance. The fact that a key element of the backup system could be vulnerable to a fire that hobbled the main one was a problem that Mayor Reed said would probably be addressed. He said Georgia Power, the regional utility that runs the underground facility where the fire occurred, was considering a series of concrete casings that would protect the switches in case of another blaze.
Joe Britton, 56, was waiting in a United Airlines check-in line with his family. They had come to Atlanta for a quick trip, the highlight of which was dinner with the former basketball star and TV personality Charles Barkley. They came to the airport at 2:30 p.m. in advance of a 6:40 p.m. Delta Air Lines flight back home to California. They were dropped off at an outdoor baggage check area, but never really got much farther. But critics had already spent a day expressing their astonishment and anger over the failure. Anthony R. Foxx, who was transportation secretary during the Obama administration, was among the many passengers who spent several hours stuck aboard aircraft stranded on the Atlanta tarmac on Sunday, unable to unload at the terminal. In a series of posts on Twitter, Mr. Foxx wrote that there was “no excuse for lack of workable redundant power source. None!”
“It was pitch black inside,” Mr. Britton said. He added: “We all understand that Snafus happen and most of the folks down here are doing their jobs to the best of their ability. But, whatever the cause, it feels like this one was compounded by confusion and poor communication.”
“We came in here for help, but there was no one who could help us,” said Mr. Britton’s wife, Michelle, 57. “There wasn’t a single Delta employee who knew what was going on. They could have at least used a megaphone to say, ‘This is what’s happening.’” Joe Britton, 56, was waiting in a United Airlines check-in line with his family on Monday. They had come to Atlanta for a quick visit, highlighted by dinner with the former basketball star and television personality Charles Barkley. They went to the airport at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, in advance of a Delta Air Lines flight home to California, which was scheduled to depart at 6:40 p.m. They were dropped off at an outdoor baggage check area, but they never really got much further.
Georgia Power, the utility that services the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, said electricity for “all essential airport activities” had been restored just before midnight, allowing everything from baggage carousels to bookstore cash registers to switch back on. “It was pitch black inside,” Mr. Britton said of the terminal.
On Monday, Ms. Britton and members of her family were hoping to catch a morning flight, but they feared that the long check-in line, plus the wait at the security checkpoint, would move too slow. Mr. Britton said they might just drive to Chattanooga, Tenn., about two hours away, if Plan A faltered. “We came in here for help, but there was no one who could help us,” said Mr. Britton’s wife, Michelle, 57. “There wasn’t a single Delta employee who knew what was going on. They could have at least used a megaphone to say, ‘This is what’s happening.’ ”
Although airlines were struggling to rebook passengers, they said they expected ordinary flights operations to return throughout Monday. That sentiment was echoed by numerous airport patrons, who described an eerie and confusing scene after the power went out around 1 p.m. Employees seemed unable to tell anyone where to go or what to do, and matters only worsened when the sun set a few hours later, bathing the concourses in darkness. The power would not come on again until 11:45 p.m.
Most crucially, Delta, which has its headquarters in Atlanta and controls dozens of gates here, said it expected its normal flight schedule to resume Monday afternoon. But the airline, which scrapped about 1,000 of its planned Sunday flights, still canceled about 300 flights to give its Atlanta “operation an opportunity to more quickly return to normal.” Some travelers said they heard a recorded announcement playing over and over, saying that an emergency had occurred and advising everyone to stand by for further instructions.
Major airlines, including American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest and United, waived certain fees or charges for passengers with imminent travel to, from or through Atlanta. “No further instructions ever came,” said Elizabeth Burton, 29, who arrived from Mobile, Ala., and missed a connecting flight to Pittsburgh, where she had a business meeting.
Speaking at the airport, a regional economic engine that hosts about 275,000 passengers a day, city officials repeatedly apologized for the outage that happened at about 1 p.m. on Sunday and left bustling corridors largely lit by the glow of iPhones. There was no indication that foul play was involved in the fire. But the incident showed how, in an increasingly interconnected world, a problem in an obscure electrical substation in north central Georgia can generate far-ranging ripples of havoc.
Georgia Power said it believed that equipment in an underground facility had failed and caught fire, damaging cables and shutting down both electricity and a backup system. Fumes and smoke, the company said, exacerbated Sunday’s episode by keeping repair workers at bay. Hartsfield-Jackson, of course, is no ordinary airport. It hosts about 275,000 passengers on a typical day. Delta, the world’s second-largest airline and a partner of giants like Air France-KLM, has its headquarters at the airport and controls dozens of gates.
“Georgia Power has many redundant system and sources of power in place to ensure reliability for the airport and its millions of travelers — power outages affecting the airport are very rare,” the company said in a statement. “The company will continue to actively work with the airport to address any remaining impacts in nonessential areas of the airport, determine the cause of today’s incident and prevent future occurrences.” Delta’s North American operations were badly stunted by the blackout, but beyond that, it had to cancel or divert nonstop flights between Atlanta and cities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. Even as the airline was wheezing back toward a normal schedule on Monday, it canceled nearly 400 flights for the day.
Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta said late Sunday that there was “no evidence to suggest that the fire was caused deliberately.” The chief executive of Georgia Power, Paul Bowers, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday that he expected the investigation would last throughout the week. Major airlines, including American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest and United, waived certain fees or charges for passengers with imminent travel to, from or through Atlanta because of the disruptions.
But the immediate fallout was immense. Passengers from Paris to Portland, Ore., had their trips canceled. Some flights were diverted — airports serving Cincinnati and New York City were among those that took in Atlanta-bound planes — and hotels near Hartsfield-Jackson were crammed. Atlanta officials opened the Georgia International Convention Center as a shelter, but many passengers sought accommodations elsewhere. The turmoil is likely to shadow travel over the next few days and into the frenzy of the holiday travel season, which analysts define as Dec. 23 to Jan. 1. AAA predicted this month that about 6.4 million people will travel by air during the year-end travel rush, an increase of about 4 percent from last year.
On Monday, Pat Kahn, 63, was waiting to find out where her bag was — a bag that was checked in on Sunday and was supposed to go, along with her, to Boston. Now, she figured, it was suspended in some mysterious limbo state. She had already missed a big business meeting in Boston — “it’s going on right now,” she said — and figured that retrieving the bag would take up her entire day. The scene at the airport Monday morning was crowded and stressful, even as airline employees passed out Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Some travelers crashed out on the floors, their heads propped on their luggage. At one point, a Christmas-caroling quartet decked out in Victorian garb serenaded a crowd, only to be met by one of those solitary claps that can feel more devastating than crickets.
Ms. Kahn had arrived at the airport at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, just before Hartsfield-Jackson went dark. The airport is owned by the city government, and has extended the historic reputation of Atlanta, a city founded in the 1830s as a railroad hub, as a city that cashes in on transportation. In recent years, however, Atlanta has suffered some major transportation debacles, including a relatively light 2014 snowstorm that brought the metropolitan area to a near-standstill, and the collapse earlier this year of a heavily traveled overpass on Interstate 85 after a fire was set beneath it.
Everything conked out as her carry-on bags were on the conveyor belt rolling toward the TSA agents. She waited, she said, in the dark until 7 p.m., because she and other travelers kept being told that the power would come on and things would be resolved shortly. On Monday, Mr. Reed, a Democrat who will leave office in a few weeks because of term limits, praised the “airport team” for pulling together “in an amazing fashion.”
“It was ridiculous, because nobody knew what was going on and they wouldn’t give us any information,” she said. But he also said that the airport needs better emergency lighting, and could have done a better job at communicating with travelers and “really addressing the anxiety that people were feeling.”
As she stood in line, she was making good progress on a mystery novel called “The Body In The Casket.” And when the lady with the doughnuts rolled by, she declined. In an apologetic video on Monday, Georgia Power’s chief executive, Paul Bowers, said the outage began with a fire in a service tunnel that helps power Hartsfield-Jackson, a sprawling complex with six passenger concourses.
“Not only did the fire disrupt our primary source of power to the concourses, but also the backup service as well,” said Mr. Bowers, who added that “our primary focus now is to investigate what happened to ensure that never happens again.”