Originally Posted by
vincentharris
I appreciate the amount of work (both initial and ongoing) and the costs associated with having physically separate electrical equipment. I also know data centers, hospitals, etc. make that investment because they know what happens in their business if they dont do that work.
ATL on the other hand went the cheap route, and basically just sent hopes and prayers that nothing would ever go wrong. Instead of building a canopy over the North Terminal they probably should have spent that money on physically separate electrical equipment. While not as sexy I guarantee now people wish they had spent that canopy money elsewhere.
I think the canopies are a dumb idea and would agree that I would have preferred that it would be invested in other more operations-focused enhancements.
But the reality is that this is probably about a 1 in 500+ year failure mode. How do I know that? Because there are not similar incidents at other airports which have identical master switch room setups and their total run time would be 500+ years when put together. How many times a year does the airport have a ground stop - or close to ground stop - as a result of weather? A 1 in a 500 year failure mode isn't worth really planning around.
If any of the below are true, I would view it as a monumental f* up:
- Life safety systems failed that would have prevented fire detection and suppression, etc (from what I understand, announcements were still working over the PA system, so this seems unlikely)
- Other critical systems (such as the tower) failed - this is not the case as the tower continued to operate normally
- Maintenance neglect or other predictable issue caused the fire in the switch room to begin with
Otherwise, I'm going to give the airport a pass (unless you can prove to me that this is unique to ATL and that most other major airports do not use a master switch room).