Chick-fil-A opens on a Sunday, and other tales from the Atlanta Airport blackout

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is often given the distinction of “World’s Busiest Airport.” Somewhere around 100 million passengers go through the airport every year. That’s a little less than a third of the entire U.S. population.

On Sunday, Dec. 18., this mega-hub of air travel all but ground to a halt. The lights shut off. Elevators stopped in their tracks. The Plane Train slowed to a stop. Plane after plane arrived on the tarmac to find the electric gates not functioning. Pilots and passengers alike waited hours, unsure what the situation was like inside or of when anything would change.

The blackout began shortly after 1 p.m., according to CNN. The Atlanta Airport published an initial tweet about the situation saying a power outage had impacted “several areas” of the airport and that officials were working to restore power. It took roughly 11 hours since that initial tweet for power to be fully restored.

The Federal Aviation Administration eventually placed a ground stop on all flights heading to Hartsfield-Jackson, meaning that any flights scheduled to stop in Atlanta were held at their airports. International flights were diverted to other airports.

It took awhile, but officials from the airport and Georgia Power discovered that a fire appeared to have caused “extensive damage” to an underground electrical facility. According to a news release from Georgia Power, a switchgear may have failed and caught fire, damaging cables that served the airport.

The fire was close enough to redundant systems designed to prevent catastrophic power failure, but those systems appeared to be damaged themselves, the release said. Georgia Power is still investigating the incident.

“Georgia Power has many redundant system and sources of power in place to ensure reliability for the airport and its millions of travelers — power outages affecting the airport are very rare,” the company said in the statement. “The company will continue to actively work with the airport to address any remaining impacts in nonessential areas of the airport, determine the cause of today’s incident and prevent future occurrences.”

At first, customers were unsure what was going on, and used social media to urge airport officials to give them more informaiton. Throngs of passengers were stuck jammed onto non-functioning escalators or in dark terminals, many of whom snapped photos and shared them on Twitter and Facebook.

One video posted on Instagram showed an airport employee sliding down the bannister of an escalator between two crowds of people making their way up the steps.

Passengers slept on the floor, and some slept on baggage carousels. With only some airport restaurants open, airport workers passed out bottled water and flight crews served beverages to passengers stranded on planes.

In what the airport called a “Christmas Miracle,” Chick-fil-A opened - on a Sunday - to serve thousands of meals to those stranded in the dark. The chain is well known for steadfastly deciding not to open its restaurants on Sunday despite pleas from some customers to do so. Atlanta’s mayor Kasim Reed thanked Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Catchy for helping during the emergency.

For some, the situation was a “nightmare.” One woman, passenger Rutia Curry, told the Associated Press the lack of information and help was frustrating. She said passengers in wheelchairs had to be carried down an escalator.

“I mean there was 40 or 50 people per the terminal area that were confined to wheelchairs and some that couldn't get through the airport very well, some of them actually couldn't walk and there was no plan at all to get them out of here without any power,” she said.

Others were frustrated that they couldn’t get to their personal items or call friends and relatives.

Meanwhile, some people on Twitter tried to make as much light of the situation as they could.

The city of Atlanta eventually opened the Georgia International Convention Center as a place for stranded passengers to stay if they so chose, and provided shuttle services to the building.

Things are slowly gearing back into normalcy, though headaches and hangups are likely to continue for several days at least. Delta, which has its headquarters near the airport, grounded some 300 flights bound for Atlanta in an attempt to reset its schedule. The airline opened a dedicated line to help customers whose luggage was affected by the blackout.

Passengers stuck in the city overnight formed long, winding lines to ticket and service counters, attempting to figure out their next steps. The mood in the airport remained one of “resignation, frustration and anger,” reported the New York Times.

Airlines have encouraged travelers to keep up to date with flight statuses, and the FAA tweeted that Hartsfield-Jackson would be able to return to normal operations by midday Monday.

This story was originally published December 18, 2017 at 2:07 PM with the headline "Chick-fil-A opens on a Sunday, and other tales from the Atlanta Airport blackout."