Oakland International Airport officials closed a busy terminal for an hour and a half on Saturday after they learned that passengers on incoming flights could have passed through a screening device in Seattle that was left unplugged.
Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike Fergus said the problem arose when a National Guardsman noticed at 7:55 a.m. that a metal detector at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport wasn't plugged in to a wall outlet.
Fergus said that after the security personnel plugged in the device, which is used to screen walk-through passengers, they realized that none of the passengers who had entered a secured area of the airport through the gate had been properly screened and that some of them may have taken an airport shuttle for other airport terminals or even have boarded flights that had already departed.
Because of that, he said, airport departures at Seattle were shut down at 9:35 a.m. and everyone who was in a secured area of the airport at that time was required to pass through a similar detector again.
Oakland International Airport spokesman George Turner said operations were shut down at the Southwest Airlines terminal in Oakland at about noon after FAA officials notified the airport of the possibility that unscreened passengers might be on board arriving flights.
Turner said that the airport was required to evacuate the terminal until the last affected Southwest flight was on the ground. He said the airport's other terminal, which serves other airlines, continued to operate normally, and the Southwest terminal was reopened at 1:35 p.m. Fergus said the FAA has already started an investigation into what went wrong. <
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