LAX Hit by 2nd Electrical Outage

For the second time in eight days, a widespread power outage hit Los Angeles International Airport on Monday, leaving some buildings without electricity for nearly two hours.

The blackout didn’t cause the same air traffic control problems as the April 12 power failure because backup batteries in the control tower worked properly and controllers continued landing planes without incident. Still, federal officials and air traffic controllers expressed frustration with the power problems.

The city Department of Water Power said the outage was caused by a malfunctioning transformer and not connected to last week’s incident, which officials linked to a disrupted power line just outside the airport.

DWP officials said they still weren’t sure what caused last week’s problems, and acknowledged that their original theory -- that a bird sparked the blackout by touching a power line -- may never be proven conclusively.

“It’s a little disturbing,” said Bob Marks, regional vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn. “This sure seems like a fragile power infrastructure.”

Added Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Donn Walker: “We want to be able to depend on consistent, reliable electricity from the power company.”

Monday’s blackout began at 11:31 a.m., causing lights to flicker in the airport. Although power returned immediately to some buildings, others remained under the dim glow of emergency lights until 1:19 p.m., when the DWP rerouted other power lines to the blacked-out buildings. Backup generators kept power going at the control tower, but other facilities were hit harder.

“It was off just long enough to knock my computer down,” said airport spokesman Paul Haney. “But no one I’ve talked to in the airlines had to reboot. So at least the critical systems in the airport kept going.”

The worst hit by the power outage was the Theme Building in the central terminal area, which includes the Encounter restaurant. The lunchtime outage left cooks, waiters and diners without power, navigating by sunlight and emergency lights.

Power officials traced Monday’s outage to a transformer at 209 World Way. The transformer is supposed to regulate power from the two circuits that serve LAX. But it was somehow disrupted, cutting off power to six electricity stations throughout the airport, said Kent Noyes, the DWP’s engineering director. Repair crews had to reroute other lines to feed power into the airport.

Noyes said the system that failed Monday was created in 1995 as a way of making LAX less susceptible to blackouts. By having two separate circuits going into the airport, officials thought they would always have a backup if one failed, he said. But this problem occurred at a station receiving electricity from both circuits.

The April 12 power failure lasted less than a second, but caused radar and communications systems at the control tower to malfunction. Dozens of planes were delayed. After the outage, control tower technicians replaced the faulty back-up batteries that had caused their equipment to malfunction.

Although DWP officials believe that a bird landing on a power line caused the initial outage, they were not able to find the bird. Officials said Monday that they still believed the power line was at fault, but said a variety of objects might have caused the damage, including a wayward squirrel, balloon or kite.

The DWP said it had ruled out sabotage or terrorism as a cause for both incidents. “It was a complete coincidence,” said DWP spokeswoman Carol Tucker.

Veteran LAX officials said this was not the first time power outages had plagued the airport.

“This is something that occurred 15 to 20 years ago routinely,” said Frank Clark, executive director of a nonprofit corporation that represents carriers operating at the Tom Bradley International Terminal. At the time, Clark was general manager of United Airlines’ operations at LAX.

In 1993, he said, the airlines got together with airport officials and demanded that the DWP fix the problem with the electrical grid, which had gotten so bad that outages would strike the airport three or four times every six months. Clark said the problems a decade ago started off just as they had this month.

On Monday at LAX, some took the power outage in stride.

“I don’t know why it keeps happening on Mondays,” said airport spokesman Haney. “Maybe that [same] bird from last week came back to haunt us.”