HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — Tampa International Airport (TPA) is no longer experiencing a power outage affecting the Main Terminal, all its Airsides, the rental car center, and the train systems.
The airport said in a Tweet just after 2 a.m. that normal operations have resumed. More repairs are expected and the cause of the outage remains under investigation, TPA said.
The airport started experiencing a power outage in various areas of the airport at 9:05 p.m.
TECO crews and airport officials responded immediately to investigate, fix the issue, and ensure that power was stable.
“We had an army of leadership descend on the airport literally within about 30 minutes of this outage to begin the process of trying to clean up the delays and disruptions that our passengers experienced," said Adam Bouchard, Vice President of Operations at TPA.
During the power outage, several flights were delayed departing the airport and hundreds of passengers arriving were stuck on planes waiting for a usable gate.
“We can’t even go into our gate so we had to wait for another plane to go and then that took like 20 minutes. Then we finally got to the gate and they updated us saying we can’t even get off the plane. So then it was like over an hour. It was hot and everyone had to go to the bathroom and it was really stressful," said passenger Alex Rocca.
“We have dozens of arrivals after 9 o’clock coming in and so when those planes are in the air they’re not stopping. So once they hit the ground, it starts to back up. That’s the backlog we were working quickly to handle," said Bouchard.
The investigation into what caused the outage continues as crews have been working to make sure power remains stable.
“The airport has multiple sources of power feeds into the airport," said Bouchard.
That's why officials said what happened on Wednesday night was so unusual.
“It’s never happened at the airport that we know of. Still don’t know what the cause was. TECO thinks it could be more than one thing that caused it," said Bouchard.
Crews are looking to see if Wednesday's storms had anything to do with it, but officials said, at this point, it's too early to comment on that.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of it to ensure most of all it doesn’t happen again," said Bouchard.
