Scrambling to avoid a repeat of a systems meltdown last month that snarled travel for tens of thousands of international passengers at LAX, U.S. customs officials have fast-tracked an overhaul of their operations here and around the nation.
Los Angeles International Airport officials say they are encouraged by the response of customs officials, who were put in a hot seat after their widely publicized system failure Aug. 11.
About $15.3 million has been allocated to refurbish technical systems at the country's 104 major airports and international border crossings within the next six to nine months, bringing the upgrade project to a close about nine months ahead of schedule, said Ken Ritchhart, assistant commissioner in the Office of Information and Technology with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
"Everything has been moved up," Ritchhart said. "We recognize the fact that having folks sit on airplanes for hours is not acceptable, so we have to look at new procedures . . . to make sure it doesn't happen again."
The outage at LAX that led to the speedup of the nationwide overhaul was the result of a single malfunctioning computer that prevented customs from screening international passengers for security risks.
Officials had no suitable backup system, and more than 17,000 arriving passengers were stranded in planes for hours while about 16,000 departing passengers waited at their gates for updates from carriers with little information.
By Thanksgiving, or Christmas at the latest, the entire customs system at LAX will be redone, with not only new workstations, network switches, routers and cables, but also a snazzy new satellite backup system that will allow screeners to access network databases should local routers fail, Ritchhart said.
Airport officials said they have seen signs that the outage -- a huge embarrassment for customs officials and a source of outrage from passengers -- has touched a nerve at the agency's highest levels.
"The tangible steps that have been taken, they're encouraging, and, frankly, they're impressive," said Paul Haney, deputy executive director for airports and security for Los Angeles World Airports, the agency that operates LAX. "We actually have tangible evidence that this is being taken very seriously and there's a commitment to ensure that there is never a repeat of this nature."
Customs officials traced the source of the LAX system outage to a malfunctioning network interface card on a desktop computer in the Tom Bradley International Terminal.
