Power Outage ATL Ground Stop

[AmericanFlyer]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/2017/12/17/power-outage-hits-atlantas-airport-flights-affected/959396001/

[bafanguy]

There are no small SNAFUs at the KATL !! Yet another great day to NOT be there. :D

[BlankBox]

https://flightaware.com/miserymap/

...offffff the charts... :p

[JRBarrett]

International arrivals destined for ATL are diverting wherever they can. At 23:55 Z Turkish 31K from IST on approach to Dulles - Delta 26 from ICN appears to be descending for Detroit etc...

[Brat]

Apparently the second time this week, last was due weather, this due a power problem.

[BlankBox]

Latest Georgia Power blurb...

6:35 pm -- Georgia Power expects power to be restored to Atlanta airport by midnight. Here is the utility's full statement:

"Georgia Power continues to work closely with Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport personnel onsite to restore power to the Airport as quickly as possible. Assessment and repair efforts are well underway at this time and the company expects to have power restored to the Airport by midnight tonight.

"Georgia Power believes the issue may have involved a fire which caused extensive damage in a Georgia Power underground electrical facility. The fire was safely extinguished by fire crews before Georgia Power could enter the area to assess damage and begin repairs.

"The event impacted not only the underground facilities, but also substations serving the Airport and, while the cause is not yet known, Georgia Power’s system responded by isolating areas where equipment wasn’t operating correctly to ensure safety and minimize damage. No personnel or passengers were in danger at any time.

"Georgia Power has many redundant systems in place to ensure reliability for the Airport and its millions of travelers - power outages affecting the Airport are very rare."

[Brat]

Seems strange that an airport emergency power back-up system was unable to cope...one imagines that every major airport has some form of standby power that operates outside the mains system. There is a form of aux power but seems to be just for peak demands times.
http://www.ecmweb.com/content/multiple-generators-provide-power-peak-shavingemergency-systems

This outage seems to have been confined to the airport so the reported fire to an underground facility seems to have effected both mains and emergency power distribution.

Emergency power was restored but not all power. Georgia Power spokesman John Kraft said the utility was working to find out the cause of the outage and restore electricity. He could not estimate when that might happen. Spokeswoman Holly Crawford said no areas outside of the airport were affected by the power cut.

[galaxy flyer]

Emergency power operates essential items, not the subway, the doors, the jetways, etc. there’s no way emergency generators could power the entire airport.

[JRBarrett]

Airports typically have fast transfer backup generation for all safety-critical functions - ATC facilities, runway lighting, navaids etc. Terminal facilities may not be on that system - especially a terminal complex as large as Atlanta, which probably draws an extremely large amount of power from the grid under normal circumstances. Fire codes would require the buildings to be equipped with emergency lighting, but that is probably all the backup that exists in the terminals.

[aterpster]

Seems strange that an airport emergency power back-up system was unable to cope...one imagines that every major airport has some form of standby power that operates outside the mains system. There is a form of aux power but seems to be just for peak demands times.
No doubt the several ILS systems went to standby power. Probably the tower as well. Beyond that there is not sufficient backup power for the computer systems for Delta and the Custom services.

Sad, if the local power company did it all in through carelessness.

[finfly1]

So in a situation like this, tens of thousands of people have their travel plans trashed, unable to get luggage, use bathrooms which have electronic flushes, likely not able to get much good phone or internet service, needing hotel rooms, rental cars, access to medicine etc etc


WHO PAYS?? (Serious question)

[CalvinHobbes]

finfly1 I don't know who pays but I know who will be paid. Lawyers. It really will be christmas for them.

[galaxy flyer]

So in a situation like this, tens of thousands of people have their travel plans trashed, unable to get luggage, use bathrooms which have electronic flushes, likely not able to get much good phone or internet service, needing hotel rooms, rental cars, access to medicine etc etc


WHO PAYS?? (Serious question)

Why does someone have pay? Stuff happens, we all pay.

BTW, the airport is open for cargo and private flights going to Signature

[WHBM]

Here's an example of what a good media relations team does for you at times of bad news. From the BBC :

"A number of major airlines, including United, Southwest and American Airlines, completely suspended their operations on Sunday."

Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport power cut strands thousands - BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42387392)


Not a word about Delta in the entire article.

[Ian W]

Airports typically have fast transfer backup generation for all safety-critical functions - ATC facilities, runway lighting, navaids etc. Terminal facilities may not be on that system - especially a terminal complex as large as Atlanta, which probably draws an extremely large amount of power from the grid under normal circumstances. Fire codes would require the buildings to be equipped with emergency lighting, but that is probably all the backup that exists in the terminals.

You are right - this is not a 'snafu' this is a really major engineering design failure. There was obviously a single point of failure for the entire Atlanta airport complex this is a fundamental of system design. From reports there was a fire in an 'underground Georgia Power facility' at the airport that had to be extinguished then Georgia Power staff get in there to repair the equipment before power was restored. It appears that the one facility was the switch gear between power possibly standby power and grid power (possibly more than one grid). As it was Sunday I would surmise that a 'routine' maintenance or swap over of power supplies went wrong. Leading to an electrical fire.

It is unforgivable for each concourse not to have individual back up power, the 'plane train' to have its own back up power each runway lighting set could have backup power and each ground facility such as ILS localizer/glidepath etc. The backup power for the concourses should be enough to run sufficient emergency lights and systems to run the operation normally but perhaps with the loss of heavy non-essential drains like kitchen power to restaurants. This is undergraduate level engineering for a major airport.

This is not something that happened last Sunday; it is a failure that has been waiting to happen for years. Delta as the main operator should request (demand?) a full audit of all essential systems to ensure that there are no other 'single points of failure'. You would have thought that Delta would have learned a lesson from their systems going down due to a similar single point of failure in power supply to primary and backup computer systems.

[Mark in CA]

Unless we're not being told everything and this was a deliberate act.

[Brat]

Certainly as Delta’s main hub they will probably suffer the most. My son, a Delta employee was trying to get back to SLA and unable due this event.

[flyboyike]

So in a situation like this, tens of thousands of people have their travel plans trashed, unable to get luggage, use bathrooms which have electronic flushes, likely not able to get much good phone or internet service, needing hotel rooms, rental cars, access to medicine etc etc


WHO PAYS?? (Serious question)

I don't know, Finfly, who paid for the damage to that cemetery?

[WHBM]

Delta as the main operator should request (demand?) a full audit of all essential systems to ensure that there are no other 'single points of failure'.
You will find that Delta have likely been banging on to this (and other) airport operators for years. Unfortunately such conversations are pretty much exclusively about reducing charges. You can find exactly this process going on at London Heathrow at present, where it has been recently announced that a revision to the new runway/terminal plans has saved GBP 2bn. Guess what contributes to such cost reductions. Reduction of redundancy and resilience of course.

It's not even as if this is deliberately done. The electrical installation is offered to the large specialists that do this work as 'Design & Build'. And the bottom bidder gets the job. You try selling resilience to a client strapped for budget.

[finfly1]

I don't know, Finfly, who paid for the damage to that cemetery?

The party responsible for the accident paid the cemetery.

And also paid the pilot.

Over thirty years ago.

[EEngr]

Utility power redundancy isn't subject to the same kind of regulations that aircraft systems are. It's cheaper to provide backup at the systems identified as being critical (comms, ILS, ATC, terminal fire suppression, etc.)

It's possible to build in redundancy, if you are willing to pay for it. But even then, unlike aircraft power systems, there are too many engineering and operations groups involved (local utility, regional power agency, terminal landlord and customer) to properly communicate the failure modes and effects back and forth through a design process..

[ethicalconundrum]

I am a nuke engineer, working in the electronics field, but I have to disagree that it's too complex or difficult to engineer a redundant grid support for an airport, including all the various feeds to various users.

We design things like this for nuclear power plants regularly. Also, for NYSE, CBT, and other financial institutions that are pretty much guaranteed zero electrical outage. We've had data lockouts, and network interruptions, but I can't recall the last time NYSE was affected by an actual power outage.

Sure it's a big calculus, and sure it's costly, but the alternative is staggering costs on failure. I work regularly with shunt battery backups, and motor gen systems that ensure way over five 9s reliability. It's also in hospitals.

Staged load shedding would include - commercial retail services in terminal, air cond/handlers(because they suck a ton of watts), lighting, etc. The critical path equipment like the network gear, computers, reservation systems would all be on local battery backups with generators behind them.

Taking out all the power from the whole structure in an airport by SPOF is pretty bad systems design. Wondering if our other massive hubs suffer the same limitations?