Over this past weekend, on one of the busiest days of the travel year, at one of the busiest airports, primary hub to one of America’s top two airlines, there was a 12-hour power outage that shut down all inbound and outbound traffic from Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport and all power inside the airport. The cause of the power outage has been reported to be “fire in a crucial piece of electrical equipment.” While a fire in electrical equipment is a known risk in any business, what makes the Hartsfield power outage noteworthy is there was no backup system in place. Former Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Foxx tweeted “There is no excuse for lack of workable redundant power source. None!” A spokesman for the local power company, Georgia Power, admitted in a statement noted there was a need for “some redundancy.”
