\n

Georgia Power announced early Monday that power is fully restored to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the world\u2019s busiest airport. More than 1,000 flights were ground on Sunday, stranding many passengers in planes and dark terminals. (Dec. 18)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Delta customers flying to or from Atlanta can make a one-time change to travel plans without incurring a $200 change fee. The airline also encouraged travellers not to pick up their bags Monday because of anticipated congestion at the airport.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, when flights at Atlanta were grounded for most of one day last spring, it took Delta five days \u2014 and about 4,000 cancelled flights \u2014 before it fully recovered.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like Sunday\u2019s outage, that April storm hit Delta\u2019s largest hub at a busy travel time when there weren\u2019t many empty seats to accommodate customers from cancelled flights. At the time, CEO Ed Bastian vowed Delta would make \u201csignificant improvements\u201d to its system for scheduling and tracking aircraft crews to recover more quickly from disruptions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other airlines also cancelled flights for the rest of Sunday. American Airlines cancelled 24 departures and an equal number of arrivals said spokesman Ross Feinstein. The airline also diverted three planes that were headed to Atlanta when the outage struck, sending them instead to Dallas, Nashville and back to Philadelphia.<\/span><\/p>\n

The city of Atlanta provided shuttle service to the Georgia Convention Center on Sunday for travellers needing a place to stay.<\/span><\/p>\n

Delta passenger Emilia Duca, 32, was on her way to Wisconsin from Bogota, Colombia, when she got stuck in Atlanta. She said police made passengers who were in the baggage claim area move to a higher floor. She said restaurants and shops were closed. Vending machines weren\u2019t working.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people are arriving, and no one is going out. No one is saying anything official. We are stuck here,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a nightmare.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Some passengers said there was a lack of information from airport officials and little help from first responders to get the disabled and the elderly through the airport without the use of escalators and elevators.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey had these elderly people, handicapped people lined up in wheelchairs,\u201d said stranded passenger Rutia Curry. \u201cThe people were helpless, they can\u2019t get down the stairs. It was just a nightmare.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Passenger James Beatty said there was no real method for evacuation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI mean there was 40 or 50 people per the terminal area that were confined to wheelchairs and some that couldn\u2019t get through the airport very well, some of them actually couldn\u2019t walk and there was no plan at all to get them out of here without any power.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Beatty said passengers carried those who used wheelchairs down stairs.<\/span><\/p>\n

The FAA said it would staff the airport control tower throughout the night so it could handle flights once they resume. The FAA said the tower could operate normally but flights were affected because airport equipment in the terminals was not working.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

According to a Georgia Power statement, the utility believes a piece of equipment in an underground electrical facility may have failed, causing the fire. The fire was next to equipment for a backup system, causing that to also fail.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo personnel or passengers were in danger at any time,\u201d the statement said.<\/span><\/p>\n

No areas outside of the airport were affected by the power loss. The utility said there are \u201cmany redundant systems in place\u201d to ensure the power supply to the airport and that such outages at the airport \u201care very rare.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Anthony Foxx, who served as U.S. transportation secretary under former President Barack Obama, tweeted that he was among the many travellers stuck for hours on a plane on the tarmac.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTotal and abject failure here at ATL Airport today,\u201d he tweeted, adding that there was \u201cno excuse for lack of workable redundant power source. NONE!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In another tweet, Foxx said it seemed like the problem was \u201ccompounded by confusion and poor communication.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Once he was off the plane, Foxx tweeted that he hoped to rent a car to drive to Charlotte, North Carolina, to catch a flight Monday morning.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sara Melillo and her husband, Greg Presto, were travelling from Kenya, where they live, to Pittsburgh to spend Christmas with his family when they were stuck on the tarmac for six hours. The couple had made stops in Nairobi and Amsterdam and landed shortly after the lights went out in Atlanta.<\/span><\/p>\n

Melillo said the pilot didn\u2019t have a lot of information for the travellers but the plane had air conditioning and attendants offered water and juice a few times. She described the Delta terminal as \u201cbig chaos\u201d with not enough customer service for the hundreds of people trying to find a flight to their next destination and a place to sleep for the night.<\/span><\/p>\n

With her new boarding pass handwritten and her bags still stuck on a plane, Melillo was hopeful that she and her husband would be able to get a flight in the morning to Pittsburgh, she said as she waited for an Uber ride to a hotel. But in a Monday morning email, Melillo told The Associated Press the morning flight had been rescheduled to the evening and they were going to the airport to try to get a different flight.<\/span><\/p>\n

Airport workers were distributing bottled water, and Dunkin\u2019 Donuts was giving out doughnuts. Chick-fil-A, which is usually closed on Sundays, opened to provide meals for travellers, according to the airport\u2019s Twitter feed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Officer Lisa Bender of the Atlanta Police Department said officers were at the airport to help with crowd control and managing traffic around the airport.<\/span><\/p>\n

At Southwest Airlines, about 70 Atlanta departures out of 120 scheduled for Sunday were cancelled, an airline spokesman said in an email. United Airlines and JetBlue Airways were among carriers reporting delays or cancellations.<\/span><\/p>\n

American Airlines reported only a handful of diversions and cancellations because the carrier does not use Atlanta as a hub, airline spokeswoman Alexis Aran Coello.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hartsfield-Jackson, which serves 104 million passengers a year, is the world\u2019s busiest airport, a distinction it has held since 1998.<\/span><\/p>\n

The airport serves an average of 275,000 passengers daily, according to its website. Nearly 2,500 planes arrive and depart each day.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Passengers wait after the lights went out at Hartfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Sunday, Dec. 17, 2017, in Atlanta. A sudden power outage at the airport on Sunday grounded scores of flights and passengers during one of the busiest travel times of the year. (AP Photo\/Branden Camp) ATLANTA (AP) \u2014 While power has been restored to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8216,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8215"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8218,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215\/revisions\/8218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}