Bird’s the Word for New LAX Outage

A crow sitting on a utility pole Wednesday caused the third power outage in 10 days at Los Angeles International Airport, further frustrating airport officials and prompting security experts to ask whether the electrical grid serving the airport area was vulnerable to sabotage.

Department of Water and Power officials responded to the blackouts by saying that they would re-route a major power feed into LAX from an aboveground line to an underground connection, a move that experts said would make the circuit less susceptible to tampering.

The early morning outage cut off electricity to LAX for several seconds. All backup electrical systems at the airport worked, officials said, and no flights were delayed.

But the temporary blip forced security officials to reboot and recalibrate explosives-detection machines and metal detectors in the airport’s nine terminals, causing delays for passengers waiting for their bags to be screened.

The glitch prompted airport officials to demand that the DWP, which supplies electricity to LAX, determine what was leading to the repeated outages. The airport previously lost power on April 12 and Monday.

“We’re looking for an explanation,” said Michael DiGirolamo, a deputy executive director at the city agency that operates LAX. “I’m worried about safety and security.”

Airport officials said they were particularly concerned about the vulnerability of the overhead power lines that carry electricity into three underground circuits serving LAX. One of the two lines that carries power to the Federal Aviation Administration tower at LAX is also aboveground. About 34.5 kilovolts course through each of these lines -- enough electricity to power about 12,000 homes.

Security experts cautioned that would-be saboteurs could take note of repeated power outages at LAX and exploit possible weaknesses in the electrical system that supplies the airport.

“Sometimes terrorists will look at a natural occurrence and say, ‘If we cause this to happen, we can play off of it,’ ” said Brian Sullivan, a retired Federal Aviation Administration security agent. “Let’s say they caused the disruption and the lines got longer and then a shooter went in and took everyone out.”

LAX security officials agreed.

“The interruption of power is not the issue, it’s what follows,” said Larry Fetters, federal security director at LAX for the federal Transportation Security Administration. The agency manages thousands of employees who operate security equipment at LAX and hundreds of metal detectors and other machines that screen passengers and bags.

Fetters said the three outages this month could be explained by failures in the local power system and were not related to terrorism. The agency works to ensure that terrorists aren’t tempted to knock out power to airports as a way of disabling screening equipment, Fetters said, by painstakingly recalibrating each machine after an electrical outage.

Airport officials said it would be difficult for LAX to lose all power. Each terminal is connected to two separate power lines. If a disruption occurs on one of those lines, the system is supposed to switch to the other one.

But on Monday, the system failed to make the switch, because a transformer had malfunctioned at a station receiving electricity from both lines. Power was out in some airport facilities for nearly two hours.

The April 12 blackout, also caused by a bird, shut down equipment in the control tower for several hours because backup batteries designed to keep the air-traffic control system running had failed. Officials have replaced the batteries, which have worked since then.

The way power is routed into LAX and fed to its terminals is similar to systems at other airports, according to technical experts who study the nation’s airports. But repeated outages at a commercial airport of its size are unusual, they said.

“That’s a pretty amazing coincidence,” said Richard Marchi, senior vice president of technical and environmental affairs at Airports Council International, a trade group. “It seems unusual in this short time period to have something happen twice with birds.”

In Wednesday’s incident, the crow on the utility pole behind the Sheraton Hotel near 98th Street and Vicksburg Avenue touched a power line at 5:53 a.m., causing a short circuit. The bird was perching on the cross arm of the power pole.

Power officials believed that as it was spreading its wings to fly, it touched the power line above it. By connecting the grounded pole with the power line, the bird became a conductor and 34.5 kilovolts of power shot through its body.

The DWP reacted to Wednesday’s failure with dismay and released a list of actions the agency said it would take to address the problem.

Dominick W. Rubalcava, president of the Board of Water and Power commissioners, said that he had asked the director of DWP’s electrical systems to conduct an audit of the utility’s systems at LAX and the Port of Los Angeles.

“Given the scope of the number of people that are affected by those facilities,” Rubalcava said, “I think we need to take a look at our infrastructure to see if it’s appropriate in terms of our capital investments.”

The utility also has asked hotels with garbage bins near the Sheraton to put lids on those bins to discourage crows from scavenging there.

DWP engineers said they also would inspect power lines and substations near LAX and would install plastic spikes on power poles to deter birds from perching there. They also placed an orange rubber blanket over the pole near the Sheraton Hotel. The DWP, the FAA and airport officials will meet next Tuesday to develop a plan to improve the system, officials said.

This month’s outages are mild when compared with past power problems at LAX.

In the late 1980s, most of the airport lost power for four hours after a delivery truck backed into a utility pole at a convenience store near LAX, said Paul Haney, an airport spokesman who was the station manager for American Airlines then.