Security Breach Closes Half of LAX

The entire south side of Los Angeles International Airport was shut down for several hours Thursday morning and at least 10,000 passengers were evacuated after security employees discovered that a metal detector in Terminal No. 4 had been unplugged.

The machine, known as a magnetometer, wasn’t working for at least an hour during the morning rush at the world’s third-busiest airport, allowing dozens of passengers to pass through it without being screened, officials said.

The shutdown delayed about 400 arriving and departing flights from 6:30 to 10 a.m.

The security breach--among the first to occur at a U.S. airport since the federal government last month assumed screening contracts traditionally held by the airlines--raised the question of whether the airlines and the federal Transportation Security Administration have devised protocols for employees who work at screening checkpoints.

It was not immediately apparent who had unplugged the magnetometer. Nor was it clear why screeners did not notice that the machine, which routinely beeps when it senses a metal object, was not functioning. Brian Jenkins, a senior advisor to the president of the Rand Corp. and a former member of the White House Commission on Aviation Security, said employees should have noticed.

The shutdown decision, made by transportation security officials, marked the first time in LAX’s 40-year history that officials were forced to close half the airport. Past incidents had usually been limited to a portion of a single terminal.

After an employee discovered the problem in the American Airlines terminal around 6:10 a.m., airport police evacuated travelers from five terminals on the airport’s south side.

These buildings are occupied by the facility’s largest carriers, including American, United, Delta and Continental.

Passengers who were forced to disembark from planes parked at the gates streamed outside to join other travelers on the crowded horseshoe-shaped roadway.

Officials emptied all terminals on the airport’s south side because they are connected by tunnels located past the security checkpoints that allow connecting passengers to travel back and forth between buildings.

Passengers were allowed to reenter terminals and required to pass through security checkpoints again starting at 8:20 a.m.

The breach prompted officials to announce that they plan to shut down the tunnels connecting Terminals No. 4 and 5 and Terminals No. 5 and 6 on the lower level--yet another post-Sept. 11 trade-off between passenger convenience and security.

“Certainly, should there be another breach of security in any one terminal, we don’t want the whole south complex affected,” said Lydia Kennard, executive director of the city agency that operates LAX. “This was an unfortunate situation. We absolutely agree that the TSA made the right call to evacuate all the terminals. We have to close the gap now.”

The tunnels, constructed to help passengers catch connecting flights, were built before the advent of passenger screening, magnetometers or X-ray machines.

Before the Transportation Security Administration assumed control, American Airlines maintenance employees would have checked security equipment, including magnetometers and X-ray machines, each morning to make sure they were working properly, one source familiar with operations said.

But now it is unclear whose job that is, according to interviews with several aviation-security sources.

“This is an area where partnership is a prerequisite to security,” Jenkins of the Rand Corp. said. “The screeners may be federal employees, but the screening process is not exclusively a federal responsibility but one shared by the industry, the local airport and the federal government.”

American Airlines corporate headquarters declined comment on the incident, transferring a reporter to a recording asking the media to call the Transportation Security Administration.

Transportation Security Administration officials said they’ve asked Huntleigh USA Corp., the firm hired by American Airlines to handle security in Terminal 4, to report back to federal security officials on the incident. The federal agency said it wouldn’t take disciplinary action against the Huntleigh employees, who still operate under a contract drawn up between the contractor and the airline.

The metal detector is prone to beep when it senses keys, coins and cell phones every few minutes. Employees should have known it wasn’t working, Jenkins said.

“First, these things have green and red lights on them, and second, they make noise,” he said.

Most passengers responded to the evacuation--one of numerous such incidents at the nation’s airports since the terrorist attacks--calmly, if not altogether good-naturedly.

“People seemed to kind of take it in stride, though I don’t think anybody was happy about it,” passenger Ed Thomas said. Thomas had been at the gate by 6 a.m. to board a flight to Washington, D.C., en route to his home in Virginia when the evacuation announcement came over the public address system.

A Delta passenger was less accepting, and he insisted the airline made matters worse by being “so disorganized.”

“They should be better prepared to handle this type of thing by now,” said Charles Tindle, who had just arrived on a Delta flight from Las Vegas and was awaiting another to take him home to Honolulu.

“Look, I’d rather be safe than sorry, but I can’t believe they couldn’t handle this better,” said Tindle, wearing a purple and black aloha shirt and smoking a cigarette while other passengers sat on the curb or snaked their way past one another’s baggage in search of a snack or restroom.

Tindle said passengers on his Las Vegas flight were taken off the plane when it arrived at LAX and made to walk through long tunnels under the airport, only to be greeted at another terminal by a security guard yelling, “Get them out of here! This is a secure area--they’ll contaminate it!”

“How would you like to be treated like that?” he fumed.