A power outage at Denver International Airport caused a ground stop Wednesday, delaying nearly 500 flights.
The outage began at 9:20 a.m. local time, airport officials said on social media, leading to officials declaring the ground stop.
As of 3 p.m. local time, eight flights have been cancelled while 272 departing flights and 217 arriving flights were delayed, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.
“The train was out of service and had no power. Some of the backup power was available, some things were working but a lot of things wouldn’t work. Even the intercom systems, they couldn’t make announcements, they couldn’t let people know,” Patrick Moreno, a California resident who was at the airport, told KCNC-TV.
Airport officials did not specify the cause of the power outage, but power company Xcel Energy told KCNC-TV that “crews were in the process of energizing a new transformer at a substation that serves Denver International Airport when a piece of equipment shut off, causing the substation to lose power.”
Power at the airport was turned back on at around 11:04 a.m., with the ground stop being lifted at around 11:35 a.m. and operations fully returning to normal by 12:19 p.m.
