PIT CEO: A Thursday Unlike Any Other

This was a Thursday like any other – right up until 3:30 p.m. when the sky darkened quickly, fierce winds bent trees horizontal to the ground, thunder cracked and rain hit hard. Our team’s cell phones lit up with messages that the airport terminal had lost power. We waited for the microgrid to kick into island mode as it has done a few times since we commissioned it in mid-2021. When that didn’t happen immediately, meetings ended, the day’s work switched to dispatching teams throughout the property to investigate, activating our Emergency Operations Center and deploying staff to calm passengers and assess partners’ operations. We were instantly into irregular operations.

The Cause

An extraordinary power surge from an intense electrical storm tore through the grid, the midfield substation (which is the interconnect to our microgrid) and our microgrid. The fail-safe design of the breakers in each of these areas did what they were designed to do, opening immediately. This safety feature embedded throughout the system acted as it should – stopping the surge before it could do damage to systems and equipment.

The Fix

Some of the first calls were between us and Duquesne Light Company (DLC), which operates the grid that serves as our backup. We worked to safely restart our microgrid generators as we communicated with DLC to mutually protect our infrastructure. Power was partially restored to Pittsburgh International Airport in under an hour and fully restored in under 90 minutes.

Because of the microgrid and our partnership with DLC, power was restored in a timeframe that potentially prevented a significantly longer outage.

PIT’s Volunteer Ambassadors and airport staff were on hand to assist travelers while power was restored throughout the airport following an outage on June 11, 2026. (Photo by Beth Hollerich)

The Fixers

Every day, I work with a team of people from the front line all the way to the front office that knows what’s at stake for passengers and partners. They coordinated response through regular EOC meetings and pushed coordinated messaging out to staff, partners, passengers, the press and social media throughout.

They worked to clear bags in the baggage system, they kept passengers and partners informed and calm in the terminal by showing up in person, they checked in with partners to help with any network issues as the system rebooted and they triaged the outage with DLC, returning operations to normal by restoring our systems.

Innovation Is Still Our Bet, Partnership Is Our Path

Thanks to our microgrid and to DLC, there were no cancellations due to the outage. Delays? Yes. But flights landed and departed allowing people and cargo to reach their destinations.

Christina Cassotis is CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority which operates and manages Pittsburgh International Airport.