Obligatory caveat: there are many horrible things going on in the world, including people whose homes and businesses have been damaged by the recent storm, so our first-world problems are minor compared to what so much of the world deals with. That said…
We were scheduled to fly from Kauai to Honolulu and then on to Kona today, so we arrived at Lihue Airport a couple of hours early to make sure we would have extra time. On arrival, lines were already all the way down the curb, so it was clear something was amiss. It turned out that the hurricane had knocked out one of the airport’s two backup generators, and the other one was on the fritz today so power kept going off. Every time that happened there was then a 10-15 minute wait for the TSA machines to reboot, and for the majority of the day they were only able to occasionally get one of their three machines running. After an hour of the line barely moving we asked the airline reps what to do, and they told us to stay in line and someone would help us sort things out on the other side of security. I called the Alaskan reservations number, but after waiting an hour for a callback was told they couldn’t do anything for us. Just past the two hour mark we had traversed about a third of the line, and our flight soon left with our bags aboard.
The fire department showed up at midday and started handing out water, ambulances were set up to help people struggling in the heat/humidity, and the power continued to go out on a regular basis. No updates were available on what to do other than “stay in the line”, so we kept our spots assuming that they were just getting everyone on to the next flight on standby once they finally got through. The absurdity of having TSA machines be the bottleneck to getting people off of an island that had just been hit by a major storm was infuriating, and particularly with so many people simply traveling between islands on trips that were little more than glorified bus rides it seems like there easily could have been some force majeure protocol put in place to simply usher anyone on an inter-island flight through, but instead flight after flight left empty while several thousand people waited in the heat and humidity for broken machines whose primary job is finding illicit bottled water.
We were hoping to make it onto the 5pm flight to Kona, and after a six hour wait were tantalizingly close to the TSA scanners, but four consecutive power outages left the line at a complete standstill. At nearly 5:30pm, when we were just about at the front of the line, I realized that our boarding passes had disappeared from the app, and not wanting to be stranded we went online and booked two of the remaining seats on a flight to Honolulu just as we got to TSA so at least we could get out. Finally into the airport, we tried to follow the advice we’d been given in the morning to ask about updating our connections, only to be told (again) that there was nothing they could do.
As we settled in to wait for our flight, TSA began sweeping through the terminal and told everyone that they would need to leave the terminal and be re-screened; we were later told that a few people might have gotten into the airport without being screened so security protocol demanded sending everyone back through the machines. Audrey had been holding it together all day while I’d been getting sick with stress, but being asked to go back into a security screening line after already having spent seven hours in line was a bridge too far for her, and we walked back out of the airport with her understandably in tears.
Thankfully they put us into a much shorter line for “re-screening” passengers, the power stayed on, and a little over an hour later we were back in the terminal, only to discover that our flight was delayed for three hours. I’m typing this from the terminal at 10:30pm, nearly thirteen hours after our arrival, hoping that this journal entry won’t further anger whatever evil spirits have been awakened on this very, very long day.