Exclusive: Get a behind the scenes look at the TSA's 'nerve' center
LOS ANGELES - In 2021 the TSA screened 23,145,734 departing travelers at LAX, making it the busiest airport for TSA screening operations in the entire country.
The TSA is expecting to screen some 90,000 passengers from midnight Sunday after the Super Bowl to midnight Monday. All those ticketed passengers will be catching planes to get out of town.
You can imagine the impact. As a result, the airport's Coordination Center has been activated. On Super Bowl Sunday instead of having his eyes on SoFi Stadium, Airport Police Lt. Darren Gilbert and five dozen others will have their eyes glued to surveillance monitors as one of the ways to keep situational awareness.
"This is our Airport Response Coordination and Communications Center which is also known as ARC. ARC has different units that do different things," said Michael Christensen, Deputy Executive Director of Los Angeles World Airports.
For example, in their traffic management pod, they’re looking at congestion on the roads and anything suspicious. In another pod, TSA workers are looking at checkpoints at various terminals on their screens where they can quickly move officers from one terminal to another if there’s an incident. There’s a shake alert map in case of an earthquake and areas where security alerts are handled. It all starts with a phone call from a terminal to the coordination center.
Justin Pierce oversees what, for the Super Bowl, will be an incident command post for all related events from Inglewood, around the airport and even into Downtown.
"What that means is we’re going to establish unified command between airport police, LAFD, Airport Operations, our partners with TSA and emergency management here on site and during the game to maintain situational awareness just in case something were to happen," Pierce said.
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They watch FOX11 and other local stations for information that we may have particularly with weather. They say winds may be an issue this Super Bowl weekend, which would require diverting planes.
"We’ve had a few instances where the winds were so high the aircraft couldn’t land there. So, they diverted and came to LAX instead."
You can imagine the impact of that on what could be a very busy Sunday night and Monday at Los Angeles International Airport. While thousands are watching the big game over in Inglewood, airport officials will be on their game making sure people in and around the airport are safe.
The TSA is planning to keep two security checkpoints open for 24-hours following Super Bowl LVI. This includes the security checkpoint on the north side of the airport, the south side of the airport, and the checkpoint at Terminal 5 will be open. This will allow those Individuals who perhaps don’t have a hotel room or are going to be heading straight to the airport after the game. Between these two checkpoints, they’ll be able to access every gate in the airport.
Their big concern is the 24-hour period from Sunday night to Monday night at when tens of thousands will be heading home after the Super Bowl.
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