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Rodents possible culprit in airport lighting glitch
The Francisco C. Ada International Airport’s airfield runway lights are back on since Monday morning after an emergency prompted the suspension of night flights over the weekend when the runway’s electrical lighting system was found to be only 30 percent lit, forcing the shutdown of the system to avoid circuit-shorting, fluctuations and burning out the entire electrical system.
The CPA board, which approved the emergency procurement of services for a company that specializes in electrical systems, authorized the provisional hiring of two electricians who have located the problem areas.
One of the electricians from the Guam International Airport Authority, Richard Cabrera, was able to locate the problems with the assistance of Saipan’s Air Operations Area or AOA and Federal Aviation Administration personnel from Guam and Saipan.
According to airport manager Ed Mendiola, the repair team was able to replace the damaged cables. Along the way, he said, they also identified runway lights that had burned out bulbs that have recently been replaced.
As to the cause of the outage, Mendiola said that Cabrera found it difficult to pinpoint the exact cause other than the fact that the circuit shortage caused electrical cables to burn, thereby rendering the lights out of service.
“One possible cause may have been from rodents in the electrical conduits. They may have chewed some of the cable insulations and exposed the wires, causing it to ground by touching the base of the cans holding the light fixtures,” he said.
Mendiola said that grounding a live high voltage wire will practically burn anything it touches, which also may have been the case with the outage of the airfield lights.
He reiterated that the airport has been able to restore the lights back to 100 percent functionality.
