Power Outages Add To Wx-Related Woes

Friday was not a good day to be flying in or out of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport... in fact, it came at the end of an altogether lousy week for weather the Pacific Northwest. But Friday, in particular, hit  travellers hard.. with inoperable ticketing counters and baggage-claim carousels in an area where American and Delta flights arrive and depart.

Thousands of passengers on the ground and in the air were affected. First, the airport's south end lost power at about 1:30 pm Friday, causing many flights to be canceled or delayed. Later in the day, the FAA's TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control Facility) was shut down for about an hour at 4:30 pm.

During the hour-long shut-down, operations were transferred to nearby Auburn control center, according to airport spokeswoman Rachel Garson. The office had been operating on emergency power, she said, but its generator evidently "ran out of fuel."

Because of the FAA outage, a nationwide "ground stop" was issued for flights bound for Sea-Tac, according to FAA spokesman Mike Fergus. By 7:00 pm Friday, however, flight delays were 10 minutes or less.

As for the morning power loss at the airport, "A lot of the morning departures didn't happen, and that was either because they didn't have an aircraft here because it didn't land overnight or because they didn't have baggage handling," Garson told the Seattle Times. "There were lots of delays."

Garson estimated about 110 flights were affected during the morning, and another 80 or so during the FAA office shutdown.

All of this from Friday's windstorm, which caused power outages around the region.

FMI: www.portseattle.org/seatac, www.faa.gov