Airport Faces Questions About Emergency Preparedness After Outage
John Amis / Associated Press
Now that operations are back to normal at Atlanta’s airport, Hartsfield Jackson is facing its next challenge: criticism over how it responded to the hours-long power outage Sunday.
Fliers complained about receiving few updates from airport workers and not having access to food or water. Many were stuck inside airplanes on the tarmac for hours.
Some might’ve wondered, was the airport prepared?
LaPonda Fitchpatrick is a retired captain from the Los Angeles World Airport police, who does emergency training. She said the airport is required to have an emergency plan.
“Does it specifically say total power failure? I can’t say, I don’t know,” Fichpatrick said. “But would their plan be able to support it? Absolutely.”
Hartsfield-Jackson maintained it has a plan for every contingency, including power loss. The plans are flexible for different levels of severity.
Federal regulations require airport-wide disaster drills once every three years. Hartsfield Jackson said it does one every two years, in addition to smaller exercises that happen quarterly.
The airport said it’s now doing an internal review of its response to the weekend’s outage to see how it could improve. It apologized for passengers’ frustrations.
The power shutdown happened after a fire in an underground substation damaged both the airport’s main electricity source and the backup. The issue lasted about 11 hours and left travelers stranded all over the country.
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