Atlanta Airport Outage

Abstract

Chris and Fred discuss what happened during the ‘2017 Atlanta Airport Blackout’ where power was lost for 11 hours, hundreds of flights had to be diverted, passengers needed to be housed in hotels, and lots of other costly things. Surely this was due to some sort of unforeseeable event bordering on the ‘supernatural?’ Nope. Not even a little bit.

Key Points

Join Chris and Fred as they discuss the 2017 Atlanta Airport Blackout. What happened? An electrical fire took out the main power supply cables running through an underground tunnel. And why didn’t the backup power kick in? Because the backup power supply cables were run through the same tunnel, and were destroyed by the same fire.

Really …

Topics include:

• This is unambiguously dumb. And it happens a lot. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (for example) had many of its emergency backup power generators located on hillsides out of the tsunami zone. But the control station for these generators were located within the tsunami zone. So after the 2011 tsunami, the generators worked fine, but couldn’t power the emergency core cooling systems.
• And when things go bad, other people tell you what needs to happen. So after the blackout, Georgia Power negotiated (as part of a legal settlement) to provide emergency backup generators to each terminal at the airport, at a cost of $ 100 million. Isn’t this great for Atlanta Airport? Not really. Georgia Power is not going to make $ 100 million manifest itself out of thin air. So energy bills moving forward (including those for Atlanta Airport) will be higher to recoup these costs. And none of this would have happened if those backup power cables went through a separate tunnel.
• But it wasn’t just about a single tunnel. The electrical fire showed how poorly equipped Atlanta Airport and/or Georgia Power were to deal with issues like this. There were no monitoring cameras, minimal fire detection systems, and inadequate fire suppression capabilities. It’s funny how the ‘simplest’ part of a system (like cables) are often overlooked in terms of their importance to functions like power provision …
• Always do big picture. If something ‘costs’ a lot of money, do you pressure the risk management team to look at the risk of not having that thing to an ‘acceptable’ level? I will bet a lot of money that something like that happened when a bunch of highly paid people concluded it was OK to run backup power cables through the same tunnel as the main ones …

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Show Notes

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