Atlanta outage, nightmare delays
Travel woes set to linger after 1 000 flights grounded
WHILE power has been restored to the world’s busiest airport, the travel woes will linger for days.
Thousands of people were stranded yesterday morning at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where more than 1 000 flights were grounded just days before the start of the Christmas rush.
A sudden power outage that Georgia Power said was caused by a fire in an underground electrical facility brought the airport to a standstill on Sunday about 1pm.
All outgoing flights were halted, and arriving planes were held on the ground at their point of departure. International flights were being diverted, officials said.
Delta Air Lines, with its biggest hub in Atlanta, will be worst hit. By Sunday night, Delta had already cancelled 900 flights and another 300 were cancelled yesterday, nearly all of them in Atlanta, according to tracking service FlightAware.com.
Robert Mann, an aviation consultant and former American Airlines executive, said Delta’s operations in Atlanta would probably only return to normal today, and for passengers “it could take most of the week”, because there aren’t many open seats on other flights in the last week before Christmas.
One bit of good news, according to Mann: Delta has more spare planes and available crews in Atlanta than anywhere else, which should help it recover.
Delta customers flying to or from Atlanta can make a one-time change to travel plans without incurring a $200 (R2 564) change fee. The airline also encouraged travellers not to pick up their bags yesterday because of anticipated congestion at the airport.
When flights at Atlanta Airport were grounded for nearly a day in April, it took Delta five days – and about 4 000 cancelled flights – before it fully recovered.
Like Sunday’s outage, that April storm hit Delta’s largest hub at a busy travel time when there weren’t many empty seats to accommodate customers from cancelled flights. At the time, chief executive Ed Bastian vowed that Delta would make “significant improvements” to its system for scheduling and tracking aircraft crews to recover more quickly from disruptions.
Other airlines also cancelled flights for the rest of Sunday. American Airlines cancelled 24 departures and an equal number of arrivals, said spokesperson Ross Feinstein. The airline also diverted three planes that were headed to Atlanta when the outage struck, sending them instead to Dallas, Nashville and back to Philadelphia.
The city of Atlanta provided shuttle services to the Georgia Convention Centre on Sunday for travellers needing a place to stay.
Delta passenger Emilia Duca, 32, was on her way to Wisconsin from Bogota, Colombia, when she got stuck in Atlanta. She said police made passengers in the baggage claim area move to a higher floor. She said restaurants and shops were closed and vending machines weren’t working.
“A lot of people are arriving, and no one is going out. No one is saying anything official. We are stuck here,” she said.
Some passengers said there was a lack of information from airport officials and little help from first responders to get the disabled and the elderly through the airport, without the use of lifts and escalators.
“They had these elderly people, handicapped people, lined up in wheelchairs,” said stranded passenger Rutia Curry. “The people were helpless, they can’t get down the stairs. It was just a nightmare.”
Passenger James Beatty said there was no real method for evacuation. “There were 40 or 50 people in the terminal area who were confined to wheelchairs and some who couldn’t get through the airport very well. Some of them couldn’t walk and there was no plan at all to get them out of here without any power.”
Beatty said passengers carried those who used wheelchairs down the stairs.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it would staff the airport control tower throughout the night, so that it could handle flights once they resume. The FAA said the tower could operate normally, but flights were affected because airport equipment in the terminals was not working.
According to a Georgia Power statement, the utility believes a piece of equipment in an underground electrical facility may have failed, causing the fire. The fire was next to equipment for a backup system, causing that to also fail.
“No personnel or passengers were in danger at any time,” the statement said.
No areas outside of the airport were affected by the power loss. The utility said there are “many redundant systems in place” to ensure the power supply to the airport and that such outages at the airport “are very rare”.
Anthony Foxx, who served as US transportation secretary under former president Barack Obama, tweeted that he was among the many travellers stuck for hours on a plane on the tarmac.
“Total and abject failure here at ATL Airport today,” he tweeted, adding that there was “no excuse for the lack of workable redundant power source. NONE!”
In another tweet, Foxx said it seemed the problem was “compounded by confusion and poor communication”.
Once he was off the plane, Foxx tweeted that he hoped to rent a car to drive to Charlotte, North Carolina, to catch a flight yesterday morning.
Sara Melillo and her husband, Greg Presto, were travelling from Kenya, where they live, to Pittsburgh to spend Christmas with his family when they were stuck on the tarmac for six hours. She described the Delta terminal as “big chaos”. – AP/African News Agency/ANA