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Atlanta airport loses power, trapping travelers in planes and terminals
- Overtonwindow 9y agoHow would the insurance work on something like this? Would the construction company which cut the line have to cover loss revenue for the entire airport? Airlines? Passengers?
- bdonlan 9y agoThe construction company would likely be liable in the end, with their liability insurance paying. If they properly arranged for utility location services and those failed to mark the conduit then that service might have liability instead. Other non-liability insurance policies might apply as to the airport and airlines and would presumably have subrogation rights against the liable party.
- danielvf 9y agoAn acquaintance of mine works for a high precision concrete paving company. The specialize in airports and data centers. Their contracts often specify a penalty rate for important data cables. Sometimes this would be $120,000 per minute that the cable is down. I think it was even an order of magnitude higher for some cables when they were working near Amazon’s data centers in Northern Virginia. Given that it would usually take two hours for a cable to be repaired, a single hit would be millions to tens of millions of dollars in fees. This resulted in a NASA like level of paperwork, checklists, and team communication before anyone so much as put a shovel into the ground on the worksite.
- donalhunt 9y agoATL is having a bad run of it lately between snow storms and power outages...
- donalhunt 9y agoLet's hope Col. Stuart isn't behind it (ref: Die Hard 2)...
- frik 9y agoThought the same, just watched it the other day. Anyway: Why are all these interesting news hidden from HN frontpage?? It's a pretty big news that the biggest airport went offline incl all power incl all lights for 11h and caused hundreds of flights got canceled and people stranded in unlit terminals in the week before Christmas. More than 5 other news from the last 24h should also be on the HN frontpage according to the voting count and comment count, but are missing too. It's a shame that info is oppressed from other users. This in transparency is disgusting.
- xxpor 9y agoWe have redundant power (coming in the building at 2 different spots) for data centers, why not for critical infra like airports? (let alone having, you know, a generator)
- diabeetusman 9y agoI'll answer your question with another question: how much money did they lose because of this power outage? Until the money lost is greater than the costs associated with adding redundant, backed up power supplies, they probably won't be added.
- 549362-30499 9y agoIt's a publicly owned and operated airport so at least in theory it isn't incentivized that way. It sure does make you scratch your head though... situations like this should be near impossible.
- BravoCo 9y agoAny word yet on whether this was a cyber attack?