John Wayne Airport back open after power outage caused flight cancellations

Orange County’s John Wayne Airport is back to normal this morning following a power outage Friday night that forced officials to cancel all flights for the evening.

Airport spokeswoman Deanne Thompson said all flights scheduled to arrive after 7:30 p.m. on Friday had been diverted to other airports.

Late Friday, the airport’s Twitter feed said all terminal power was slowly coming back on line. The airport is open to all commercial flights today, according to a tweet from the airport’s account.

A problem with an electrical transformer in nearby Irvine caused the outage, Thompson said, which affected all three terminals at the airport.

Generators kicked in at 7:57 p.m., she said, so people were not sitting around in dark terminals.

“People are not happy, but they’re rolling with it. They realize we’re doing the best we can,” Thompson said.

Southern California Edison indicated on its website that more than 28,000 customers in Irvine were affected by the outage and that crews had not released information on the cause or repair efforts.

An outage at Los Angeles International Airport in June caused multiple flights to be canceled because of a glitch at a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power station.