July/August - 16

AIRPORT PROFILE
The baggage carousel can operate with only two of its four motors.
covered up these beautiful tiles. It was
a unique experience to be able to see
some of these tiles open up for the
first time in maybe decades in some
cases and to get those cleaned up and
bring it back to its former glory. It's
an exciting part about this job to be
able to see that once it becomes a fully
finished product. "
Challenges and
Successes
Cahill said keeping the flow of traffic
to the baggage claim devices and units
while getting everything in place
provided some challenges.
" There's a period of time where
we're removing the operations from
the original check baggage area that
they had behind the historic building
and their comfort level on their
existing makeup canopy. Once we
open up that ticketing building and
that whole operation is now shifting
to a new setup, there's a lot of work
for us to then start bringing in all of
our utilities that are coming in from
the south side of the project that we
had started on with the ticketing and
CBIS building, and then making sure
that we're phasing our project in such
a way where we had to take out all
this old existing infrastructure for the
initial CBIS, but still allowing public
access to get their existing claim units
that were on the north side of the
campus and still allow us to continue
doing all our work, run all of our new
utilities over to the new building. "
Cahill continued, " I think we were
able to accomplish that goal with I
think very limited hiccups, if any
really in terms of customer experience
once they left the sterile side
of the airport, picked up their bags.
Other than the Southwest issues that
they had over the holidays, which
is a entirely separate matter, but we
were constantly focused on making
sure that we're having very limited
impacts even though we're bringing
all this new power and everything
that's going to be feeding this new
baggage claim building. "
Acosta said one of the things the
team did successfully was coming up
with unique ideas of how to maintain
the baggage claim systems existing
in operation while doing the other
construction.
" I think that's the tricky part with
projects like this that are phased, the
team really needs to work together
with operations and the design team
to really break what should essentially
be one building into multiple phases
to coordinate permitting, to coordinate
the operations that are existing
and activating the new while the old
is working, " Acosta said.
16 \ AIRPORT BUSINESS / JULY/AUGUST 2023
Lum said despite COVID pushing
back the original timeline, the project
has overall been very successful thus far.
" We are very excited that the baggage
claim is open and operational right now.
We feel the design is beautiful and the
whole outdoor/indoor feel of our
airport really just checks all the boxes in
terms of looks, aesthetics and feel, " Lum
said. " And as far as the program overall,
we're very excited that this program
has been going on for the last five, six
years now. And it was originally intended
to be a much shorter program. But
obviously COVID happened and that
really affected our airport. Our traffic
dropped 95% almost overnight. And
that's a lot of anticipated revenue that
we were anticipating to help fund the
project. And then it vanished, and we
really had to rethink our strategies and
how we were going to succeed. But fortunately...
We did slow down, but we
didn't stop the program. And we are
in a much better place today. Traffic
has returned and passengers are traveling
again. And it's really good for
us and our partners with Southwest.
They're ramping up their schedule.
And now we've got
three brand
new facilities to help support that
operation. And we're really looking
forward to completing the last three
projects and really tying this whole
terminal area program up. " 
July/August

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of July/August
