Story here. Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Didn’t see a thread about it, so I’m starting this one. Feel free to close it if I missed it.
But the world’s busiest airport has been socked with a total power outage for six hours now. Cause unknown, and they’re saying it may take a couple of days to get back up to speed, and that’s only once the power comes back to any extent.
Ominously, John McClane has been spotted running through the facility.
Formerly “World’s Busiest Airport” Chicago’s O’Hare Field just sitting there, pointing and laughing…
From Georgia Power:
Single point of failure? Not smart, Georgia Power.
I’ve read that international flights are being diverted to other airports because while they can land, I think, customs is down so the people on them can’t go anywhere.
Have fun, Delta.
Not necessarily a single point of failure.
Here’s a perspective from a guy who builds data centers for Amazon. It was written a few months ago about similar problems: At Scale, Rare Events aren’t Rare – Perspectives
His punch line being that a lot of protective systems are concerned with protecting themselves, not the far more valuable things downstream that they shut down in self-defense.
I certainly don’t know the details about ATL today, so this may not be relevant to this incident. But it is thought-provoking about redundant system design.
I assumed some guy running a floor polisher knocked a plug loose.
In case you haven’t seen it,here’s exclusive footage of what happened.
Good Jeopardy question. “This city has the busiest airport in the world.”
Sounds like one for the recent thread Trivia questions which, amazingly, have two answers.
How do you have redundancy in power distribution?
Electric lines coming from two separate sources/substations/directions.
I am surprised that they weren’t able to call in a generator trailer, hook it up & be back running fairly quickly.
That is going to be darn expensive. You have to keep them in phase, for one thing.
You don’t route the main power and the backup power through the same narrow tunnel for one thing. Because there can never be a fire there, right?
Like I said, single point of failure.
It appears that planes which had left the gate were stuck 3 hours before they even started to bring them back for unloading, which they could only do a few at a time. Poor people. I know airlines get fined when they screw up and strand people on planes too long, but I trust that they won’t for this case, since it wasn’t there fault.
The tower still had power, but no number of backup generator trucks is going to handle a full airport.
They already had backup power. But they put it next to main power.
Why not? It’s got a big foot print but most of it is lighting, which, especially if LED, isn’t that big of a draw.
The other major draws are
[ul]
[li]ticketing/gate computers, but they don’t all need to be powered. [/li][li]Merchant computers/cash registers. Relatively small draw each, but numerous.[/li][li]Security screening/x-ray machines. Again, they can limp by on some limited percentage of those running. [/li][li]The last ‘big’ draw is the baggage/conveyor system, which is a series of motors running belts. [/li][li]Are the jet bridges electric or some type of combustion engine?[/li][/ul]
This assumes ATC is separate.
The jet bridges are electric and draw tons of power. That was one of the big problems. They were immobile.
I point out that it also has a coca-cola bottling plant, a baseball stadium, bad traffic…aaaaaaaaannnnddd…
:D:p
“Goddammit, Edna, I thought you mailed the check to the electric company.”
So many people affected, their holiday plans ruined in many cases. What of the people who had cheap, non refundable, connecting flights somewhere? What a nightmare!
There must be sooo many frustrated and miserable people stuck there, it breaks my heart to think of it. I hope they get it fixed and up and running again soon.
