CBS 2 is reporting a series of missteps which added to the mayhem at Newark Liberty International Airport on Sunday. The six-hour delay stranded thousands of people, creating extreme crowding and chaos.
The mistakes made at the airport give new meaning to the term “domino effect.” It was a cascading series of missteps that cry out for action.
The sign at the Transportation Security Administration screening post at Newark read: “Premises Under Constant Video Surveillance.”
What is should add is: “If We’re Lucky.”
That’s because CBS 2 has learned that when an unidentified man breached a secure area at Newark on Sunday night, delaying thousands of passengers for hours, the TSA cameras weren’t working.
That’s right – they weren’t even recording, sources said, and needed a reboot, which the agency apparently didn’t ask for. That set off a chain reaction of even more missteps that caused needless chaos and inconvenience for several thousand hapless passengers.
With the cameras inoperable, the TSA tried to get a second set of surveillance video from Continental Airlines. But the TSA apparently didn’t know the correct telephone number and the specific procedures to get the footage. That caused a two hour delay in identifying the intruder and closing the airport to look for him.
When they finally got the footage, they couldn’t find the intruder, discovering later that he had slipped out another entrance 20 minutes after he arrived.
(Source: WCBSTV / YWN-112)
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2 Responses
Uh folks, it is in the constitution. This is about providing for the common defense and securing domestic tranquility. If you can’t do that then we are doomed.
I’ve always been troubled by TSA.
The Bush administration (anti-big government, pro-private sector) created, in one move, a large agencies that directly competed with private security companies at the airports.
This is not to say that the private companies were doing a good job (some were better than others) but I can’t help but wonder: what if the Bush administration had stayed true to its conservative fundamentals? We could have had national standards with private security companies competing to provide better security at a lower price. Instead, we have a large bureaucracy at taxpayer expense whose mistakes cost the airports and airlines millions and waste passenger time.