FBI Involved With Atlanta Airport Blackout Probe; No Sign Of Terror

The FBI has joined the probe into what caused a fire that knocked out power to the world’s busiest airport in Atlanta, but an agency spokesman said Tuesday there was no sign of anything connected to terrorism.

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“There’s no indication at this point of anything nefarious,” FBI spokesman Kevin Rowson said.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has also been involved in the investigation, Georgia Power spokesman Craig Bell said.

“We’re bringing everything we have to bear to the situation to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Bell said Tuesday.

No conclusions have been drawn as to the cause of the fire, which took out the airport’s power supply and also its backup electricity for about 11 hours Sunday. The blackout stranded thousands of passengers on grounded jets and in darkened concourses and led to the cancellation of more than 1,500 flights just ahead of the frenzied holiday travel period.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the main hub for Delta Air Lines, is a crucial cog in the nation’s air travel system. Delays there typically ripple across the nation because so many U.S. and international flights are routed through the Atlanta hub.

Because of the magnitude of Sunday’s outage, “we want to be able to rule out any possible scenario that wasn’t equipment malfunction,” Bell said.

“We really don’t expect any answers like that to come forth for a few days,” he said.

The power company is working with the airport to explore how to prevent the situation from happening again.

Among ideas being discussed: Encasing in concrete the area that holds key electric equipment, or moving parts of the system to other areas. The blaze took out the main power and the backup system because the fire burned through parts of both in the same underground utility tunnel, authorities have said.

After Power Outage

Delta Air Lines and other carriers said they expected to be running normally Tuesday. But passengers trying to catch Tuesday morning flights faced wait times of up to an hour just to get through the main security checkpoint in the domestic terminal, the airport’s website showed.

A spokesman for Delta, by far the biggest airline at the world’s busiest airport, said most of its delayed passengers had been booked on flights scheduled to leave Monday. Spokesman Michael Thomas said the airline should be “largely if not completely” back to normal by Tuesday, well before the huge travel weekend ahead of Christmas Day.

But no matter how fast Delta and other airlines move, it will take a few days to get the hundreds of thousands of grounded passengers to their final destinations, said Robert Mann, president of an airline consulting firm in Port Washington, New York. In rare cases, some passengers won’t arrive until Thursday, he said.

“There are just so few seats available during a peak holiday week, that’s just going to take a lot of flights with four or five seats apiece,” Mann said.

Southwest, the airport’s second-largest airline, said Monday it was back on a normal schedule, but a spokesman could not say how long it would take to clear the backlog of stranded travelers.

American Airlines, which is much smaller, said that it, too, booked many of its passengers on new flights but that some will have to wait until later in the week to fly.

The fire broke out Sunday afternoon next to equipment for a backup system, causing that to fail, too. Power wasn’t fully restored until about midnight.

The control tower did not lose power because it has a separate electrical feed, and planes that were in the air and close to Atlanta when the blackout hit were allowed to land. Other incoming flights were diverted, and outgoing flights were halted.

Anthony Foxx, who was transportation secretary under President Barack Obama, was among many travelers stuck for hours in a plane on the tarmac. He blasted airport officials, saying the problem was “compounded by confusion and poor communication.”

“Total and abject failure here at ATL Airport today,” he tweeted, adding that there was “no excuse for lack of workable redundant power source. NONE!”

Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers issued an apology and blamed the fire on a failure in a switch gear. He said the utility is considering a change in the setup of the main and backup systems to prevent a similar blackout.

Finding Seats For Stranded Passengers

Around noon Monday, stranded travelers sat on the floor, charging cellphones at the electrical outlets. An Atlanta city employee in a Santa hat gave out candy.

David and Lynn Carden, sitting in soft chairs in the airport’s atrium, left London early Sunday for Key West, Florida, but were diverted to Cincinnati because of the blackout. Delta got them a hotel room and put them on a Monday flight to Atlanta. From there, they awaited an afternoon flight to Florida.

“Delta has been pretty good,” David Carden said, counting themselves luckier than passengers who spent the night in an airport. “We don’t always get this kind of customer service in the U.K.”

College student Joe Ryan had planned to fly home to Chicago with his fiancee on Sunday on American after a four-day seminar in Atlanta. They spent Sunday night on a carpeted floor outside an elevator at the airport. He initially was told it could be Tuesday before he would get a flight home, but later he said he was able to get on a Monday flight.

Delta canceled about 1,000 flights Sunday and 400 more on Monday, in many cases because the pilots and airplanes were in the wrong places. To help clear the backlog, it added flights and found seats for some of its customers on other airlines.

Last spring, Delta was crippled by a storm in the South, and it took the airline five days — and about 4,000 canceled flights — before it fully recovered.

Thomas, the Delta spokesman, said that since then, the airline has put more flight crews on reserve and installed computer technology to quickly assemble properly rested crews.

Hartsfield-Jackson serves an average of 275,000 passengers a day. Nearly 2,500 planes arrive and depart each day.

Mann said the rebooking of passengers was probably complicated by the large number of inexperienced travelers this time of year.

“They’re more elderly, they’re more young people, they’re more infrequent travelers,” he said. “All these folks are going to require a lot of face time a lot of hand-holding.”