Nulli makes a very good point here......
Plan 'Bs' in the business world are referred to as risk mitigators, or controls. A robust and formalised Risk Management (RM) system (as opposed to relying on intuition - albeit the intuition of often very experienced players) uses wide and intensive consultation (the first step in the ISO31000 process model) to help identify risks so that they can be assessed and ultimately controlled through the mitigation of the risk and the subsequent achievement of the reduction in risk level. Before you yawn and I lose you, consultation is the key......
The consultation step MUST include both internal and external stakeholders. If the closed counters are indeed the root cause of the delay, then I respectfully suggest that the failing at the management level may well be a lack of external consultation, otherwise the "scheduled" closure of counters 13 and 14 would have be known and controls developed to deal with the consequence should they impact proposed operations.
Having said that, however, the level of activity required to affect a start-up operation is intense and it is under this stress that things can be missed. This happens at the pointy end too - where overload affects pilot performance and leads to error, but hey, we're all human.