All it took to bring air travel at one of the busiest airports in the United States to a screeching halt was the failure of a single electrical panel and the resulting small, overnight fire. But why did the panel fail, and how did the fire start?

The root cause has yet to be publicly determined, but we’ve seen this too many times before. Airport power systems are made up of thousands of components that require constant observation and maintenance that, unfortunately, most systems are not currently set up perform. As our CEO Robin Thompson wrote in a post that was featured by the LinkedIn News team in their coverage of the outage, “In nearly every case, vigilant monitoring of splices, switchgear and connections could have averted these outages at a fraction of the cost.”

We’ve seen just how valuable that kind of monitoring can be in our work with multiple sites, most notably the Atlanta Harstfield-Jackson airport: