Stranded Passengers Received Food, Water, Other
Necessities
The cause of a computer outage that
stranded some 17,000 international passengers on the ramp at Los
Angeles International Airport last weekend has been traced to a
single local area network card.
Officials with the US Customs said this week the problem had
been traced to a desktop computer in the Tom Bradley International
Terminal.
As ANN reported, the
resulting delays forced some planes to sit on the tarmac for
hours... so long, in fact, that crews were kept busy refilling fuel
tanks for the aircrafts' auxiliary power units, so the planes could
run their air conditioning units.
Jennifer Connors, a chief in the office of field operations for
the Customs and Border Protection agency, said problems began
Saturday afternoon when a partial failure of the card began slowing
the system down.
The resulting domino effect caused the total system failure
around 2:00 pm, she said. "All indications are there was no
hacking, no tampering, no terrorist link, nothing like that. It was
an internal problem."
It took technicians about nine hours to restore service... only
to see the system crash again Sunday evening, but for only a little
more than an hour this time. That outage was traced to a power
supply failure, said Connors. It's unknown if the two incidents are
related.
Now, everyone wants to know what happened. Customs and Border
Protection formed a group in Washington to study the failures, said
agency spokesperson Michael Fleming; Rep Jane Harman (D-Venice)
requested a comprehensive briefing Tuesday; LA City Council members
Bill Rosendahl and Janice Hahn demanded an immediate report on what
has been done to permanently correct the computer malfunction
problem (like that's even possible) and contingency plans in the
event this happens again.
According to Connors, there was a plan in place to update and
replace the entire U.S. Customs information technology system at
major international airports. The LAX leg of the work is scheduled
for completion by October 2008.
While passengers were stranded, the customs agency authorized
the airport to supply food, water and other necessities such as
diapers to passengers as well as the fuel to keep air-conditioning
systems running.
According to Nancy Castles, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles
World Airports, the customs agency "has total federal jurisdiction
on whether or not to allow people on or off the planes."
Airport and customs officials are currently discussing how they
will handle a similar, future incident, she said.