Denver airport security suffered another meltdown yesterday.
A woman had been pulled aside after the initial screening and was queued up in the little plexiglass holding line for further wanding and checking.
When none of the security folks were looking, she simply undid the nylon gate in front of her, stepped through, picked up her scanned luggage, and walked down to the train platform to the concourses.
She was able to do this, apparently, because the security personnel were all busy, and there was nothing else keeping her from doing it.
A man behind her in line notified security, but at that point they were unable to find her. Now you’d think that the obvious thing to do would be to stop the trains, evacuate the train platform, return all the trains to the main terminal, and force those folks to screen again.
No, since they couldn’t identify the woman in question (aside from some grainy video footage), they evacuated all the concourses, forced 15,000 passengers to rescreen, and delayed 146 flights (which, of course, then has a ripple effect across the nation).
How can I tally up the idiocies here?
- Why was it so easy for the woman to simply continue on her way? Why didn’t any of the security see her? I suppose it’s too much to ask to have the security shift manager fired, and the various security workers that were nearby fined or somehow otherwise punished?
- Why was the response so out of proportion? It couldn’t have been more than a minute before security was notified, and simply locking down all the trains, while disruptive, would have been a hell of a lot better than evacuating all the concourses.
- Why is the only video footage of the woman so bad? If that’s the quality of the security cameras and tape, then they’d better get new equipment, because it’s virtually unusable.
DIA should be one of the easiest airports in the country to make secure, since all access to the concourses is so controlled. Instead, we keep having Keystone Kop episodes like this. Makes me glad that my business travel has significantly gone down this year, “airline crisis” or not …