Airport Working to Get Generator Up and Running
By Springer, Dan
La Crosse Municipal Airport officials hope repairs will be completed soon to the backup generator that powers a portion of the airport’s terminal during power outages. The generator – one of four on airport property – has been on the fritz for several weeks, despite repair efforts made by the airport’s electrician and maintenance staff, airport manager Dan Wruck said Tuesday.
The terminal was left in the dark Sunday evening when Xcel Energy had to cut the grid that provides power to the terminal and a large portion of French Island after a car struck a utility pole earlier in the evening.
Because of the power outage, which the airport was warned about in advance, the Northwest Airlines flight scheduled to arrive in La Crosse at 11:53 p.m. never left Minneapolis.
Without power, it would have been extremely difficult to serve the customers who were on that flight, so it was cancelled, Wruck said.
“We have other contingency plans to off-load passengers in cases like this,” Wruck said. “It’s not real effective or efficient, but it can be accomplished.
Even if the terminal’s generator was working, Wruck said, it would not have provided enough power to fully power the terminal.
“That generator only provides enough power to run some emergency lighting and the elevator,” Wruck said. “It’s not designed to be a stand alone and fully capable of sustained operations under a power failure.”
Because the airport’s runway lights, the police station and the fire station are on a different power grid, they didn’t need to use the operational generators.
The airport garage, which also lost power, could have been served by a generator, but no one was in the garage late Sunday night, Wruck said.
“Fixing the generator has been an ongoing issue for us. We’ve replaced some of the components we thought were the problem but haven’t been able to fix the problem,” Wruck said. “More parts are due in (Wednesday) and once again we hope that will fix the problem.”
Copyright La Crosse Tribune Aug 1, 2007
(c) 2007 La Crosse Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.