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.

FMI: www.lawa.org, www.customs.gov