John Wayne Airport reopens after power outage caused flight cancellations

Orange County’s John Wayne Airport was back to normal Saturday following a power outage Friday night that forced officials to cancel all commercial flights for the evening.

The airport said on Twitter at 6:40 a.m. that the airport was open for commercial flights, though it advised passengers to check with their airline about any potential delays and how to get baggage from flights that were canceled.

General aviation flights were not affected by the outage.

On Friday night, airport spokeswoman Deanne Thompson said flights scheduled to arrive after 7:30 p.m. had been diverted to other airports and that flights scheduled to leave after 8 p.m. would not depart. She did not know how many passengers were affected.

Late Friday, the airport’s Twitter feed said all terminal power was slowly coming back on line after a problem with an electrical transformer in nearby Irvine caused the outage, which affected all three terminals at the airport, Thompson said. The outage was reported at about 7 p.m.

Generators kicked in at 7:57 p.m., Thompson said, so people weren’t sitting in dark terminals.

“People are not happy, but they’re rolling with it. They realize we’re doing the best we can,” she said.

The outage was caused by a fire in an electrical vault at an SCE substation at Jamboree Road and Michelson Drive, according to the Irvine Police Department. The Orange County Fire Authority responded to the fire. The cause of the blaze was not immediately clear.

Southern California Edison indicated on its website that more than 28,000 customers in Irvine were affected by the outage. Almost 12,000 were still without power late Saturday morning.

Portions of the UC Irvine campus were affected by the outage, school officials said.

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Dolan writes for the Los Angeles Times. KTLA and Daily Pilot staff contributed to this report.