When a fire at an electrical substation knocked out power for half a day at the Atlanta airport recently, airlines canceled more than 1,400 flights and thousands of passengers were stranded. Some sat in the airport terminal in the dark, while others waited on planes out on the tarmac for hours.
If only one of those passengers had had the ability to prevent such a calamity, he surely would have—right?
“Total and abject failure here at ATL Airport today,” tweeted former Obama transportation secretary Anthony Foxx. “I am stuck on a @ delta flight, passengers and crew tolerating it. But there is no excuse for lack of workable redundant power source. NONE!”
If there is one group of people who know about “redundant power,” it is Washington bureaucrats. The Department of Transportation has an annual budget of about $98 billion and some 58,000 employees. But none of them apparently thought to beef up power sources at major U.S. airports. The 2009 Obama stimulus “supported 800 projects improving our airports and air traffic control facilities,” the DoT says, but none prevented the “abject failure” at the world’s busiest airport.
Of course, it’s silly to expect that government, even one as large as ours, can anticipate every emergency. Accidents happen. Then again, a lot of people look to government to solve problems significantly smaller than an 11-hour blackout at one of the country’s major transportation hubs.
Before blaming others, Foxx might have followed a different course: He could have made it into the airplane’s lavatory and taken a look in the mirror. But that move would have required unbuckling his seatbelt, which would surely have been against regulations.
