Snow Shifts Bottom Lines

Kelly Johnson knows one undeniable fact about weather.

“Sometimes Mother Nature just wins,” said Johnson, airport director at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport.

That was the case during the snowstorm of Feb. 9, when XNA was forced to close for one of the few times in its more than 12 years of operation. Local snowfall of about 20 inches and drifts as high as three feet on one side of the runways made the decision a no-brainer, especially considering airlines already had made the early-morning call to cancel flights for the entire day.

“We really do try hard to keep this place open, but not at the sacrifice of safety,” Johnson said.

Such was the case on Dec. 31, 2010, when XNA was forced to close for a little more than three hours. That closing was related to the tornado that hit the community of Cincinnati.

Johnson said she received a phone call in the wee hours of the morning, alerting her that debris from the tornado had begun to fall at and around XNA. The presence of the debris was deemed a safety hazard, and coupled with high winds, prompted Johnson and other officials to make the call to close the airport.

They then scrambled to clean up the debris, which consisted of everything from large pieces of corrugated metal to torn pieces of mail.

“Our whole crew went to work cleaning up everything as fast as we could,” Johnson said. “I was out here with garbage bags. … It was a mess.”

The most recent closing, however, came at a higher price. Including loss of revenue, equipment costs, and overtime for airport personnel, among other factors, XNA’s total cost for the “snow event” was estimated at more than $85,000.

That number actually doesn’t even take into consideration other factors such as lost percentage of food sales, monies lost because there were no aircraft landing and refueling, etc.

“It grows exponentially when you start adding all those things,” Johnson said. “It’s just a lost day.”

Buckle Down

Despite the circumstances, though, Johnson said the XNA crew never stopped battling the elements.

“Even though everything was canceled, we didn’t lollygag with it,” she said. “We cleaned up everything as fast as we could.”

For starters, three 22-foot plows were employed to clear the runways. They were arranged “in a staggered Conga line,” Johnson said, and started moving the snow “from the inside to the outside.”

The airport’s snow blower was then brought in to dispense the moved piles into adjacent fields. The airport re-opened about 9 p.m. and a handful of corporate flights were allowed to land.

By that time, however, the aforementioned total cost had begun to mount. Estimates put overtime pay at more than $4,600 and loss of revenue at just less than $17,000.

Equipment costs were more than $35,000, meanwhile, and two tons of chemicals used to help melt the snow cost more than $4,100. Add thousands more for snow removal on parking lots and sidewalks, and the $85,000 total becomes easily explainable.

Another Perspective

While XNA crews worked doggedly to get the airport re-opened, general manager Patrick Jennings and a staff of 35 workers at Bentonville’s nearby Clarion Hotel & Convention Center worked equally as hard to accommodate not just guests stranded for a night longer than expected, but displaced travelers and flight crews.

“It was actually kind of fun,” Jennings said.

Anticipating the chance of massive snowfall, Jennings called in his staff on the morning of Feb. 8. He said no one left until Feb. 11.

That strategy resulted in higher than normal operating costs, even as revenues were “about a wash,” Jennings said.

What Jennings said he hopes the Clarion gained, though, is harder to measure. With about 45 vehicles buried in snow, Jennings had a crew of six workers clear empty space in a back lot, then dig out each guest’s vehicles in the surrounding lots.

The effort started mid-afternoon on Feb. 9, and took hours to complete. But by the time the first guests began to check out at 4 a.m., Jennings’ crew had cleared each guest’s vehicle, warmed it, and driven it around to the front entrance.

Clarion workers did that for every guest that departed that morning, Jennings said.

“Those guests were blown away,” he said. “I can’t imagine any of those people that were here then going anywhere else next time they’re in town.”

Both Jennings and Johnson said their crews’ hard work was simply a result of trying to service their respective customers to the best of their abilities. Johnson said there’s no other real option when dealing with Mother Nature.

“The winter is just the winter,” she said.