
Atlanta airport loses power, trapping travelers in planes and terminals - Overtonwindow
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/airplane-mode/atlanta-airport-loses-power-trapping-travelers-planes-terminals-n830546
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Overtonwindow
How would the insurance work on something like this? Would the construction
company which cut the line have to cover loss revenue for the entire airport?
Airlines? Passengers?

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danielvf
An acquaintance of mine works for a high precision concrete paving company.
The specialize in airports and data centers.

Their contracts often specify a penalty rate for important data cables.
Sometimes this would be $120,000 per minute that the cable is down. I think it
was even an order of magnitude higher for some cables when they were working
near Amazon’s data centers in Northern Virginia.

Given that it would usually take two hours for a cable to be repaired, a
single hit would be millions to tens of millions of dollars in fees.

This resulted in a NASA like level of paperwork, checklists, and team
communication before anyone so much as put a shovel into the ground on the
worksite.

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xxpor
We have redundant power (coming in the building at 2 different spots) for data
centers, why not for critical infra like airports?

(let alone having, you know, a generator)

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diabeetusman
I'll answer your question with another question: how much money did they lose
because of this power outage?

Until the money lost is greater than the costs associated with adding
redundant, backed up power supplies, they probably won't be added.

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549362-30499
It's a publicly owned and operated airport so at least in theory it isn't
incentivized that way. It sure does make you scratch your head though...
situations like this should be near impossible.

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donalhunt
ATL is having a bad run of it lately between snow storms and power outages...

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donalhunt
Let's hope Col. Stuart isn't behind it (ref: Die Hard 2)...

