Alaska Airlines ground stop cancels 2 Redmond Airport arrivals, 2 departures – followed by an airport power outage
Barney Lerten
(Update: Pacific Power updates outage cause)
REDMOND, Ore. (KTVZ) — The Redmond Airport got off to a somewhat rocky start this week, as a three-hour “ground stop” of all Alaska Airlines flights led to the cancellation of two arrivals and two departures – followed by a power outage that put the airport on backup power for an extended period.
Alaska Airlines issued the halt to all of its and Horizon Air’s flights around 8 p.m. Sunday due to an unspecified “IT outage.”
That led to the cancellation of two RDM arrivals Sunday night, from Portland and Seattle, and as a result, two Monday morning flights out of the airport also were canceled, Airport Manager Zachary Bass said.
And then, early Monday morning, a Pacific Power line serving the airport went out.
“It looks like one of the power lines that connects to the airport went down,” Bass said at mid-morning. “They’re at the break in the line and they’re fixing it. It should be back pretty soon.”
“We are on generator backup power for our critical needs,” Bass said. “So passengers might see a little inconvenience here or there, but overall, most of our components are on backup.”
All of the other scheduled flight departures went out as planned, Bass said.
Pacific Power spokesman Simon Gutierrez told KTVZ News that he’d learned “we have a fault on an underground cable that serves the airport. This is a cable that runs under their parking lot and is extra deep, making it difficult to locate.”
The utility’s outage map said early Monday afternoon that crews were still working on the damaged equipment. An estimate for restoration was not given, saying they were still assessing the problem.
It’s not the first such outage, Bass said. Ground was broken recently on a major terminal upgrade, and “the plan under our construction project is to give us more redundancy with our electrical system.”
In the meantime, things … happen.
“It’s an airport – it’s always eventful,” Bass said.