Officials were trying to determine on Monday how a man who walked through the wrong door on Sunday afternoon turned the busiest terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport into a human traffic jam on one of the busiest travel days of the year
Passengers waited after a possible security breach shut down a terminal at the Newark Liberty International Airport on Sunday.
Flights from Terminal C at Newark were halted after a passenger told Transportation Security Administration officials that the man went the wrong way through a one-way door at about 5:20 p.m.
That put the man in the secure area of the terminal even though he had not gone through the screening post a few steps away.
A spokeswoman for the agency, Ann Davis, said a security officer was posted in the area the man entered, the exit lane reserved for passengers on their way to collect baggage after coming off planes that had landed. She said the officer apparently did not react when the man went through the door, which she said was marked with “do not enter” signs.
Whether the officer saw the man pass through “remains to be seen,” Ms. Davis said.
Alerted by the passenger who saw the apparent security breach, officials began looking for the man in the terminal, Ms. Davis said. She said T.S.A. officials also worked with Continental Airlines, the dominant airline at Terminal C, to retrieve tapes from surveillance cameras in the area “to ascertain if in fact an individual had entered the sterile area through the exit lane.”
She said the surveillance tapes confirmed what the passenger had said. And after about two and half hours with the man still unaccounted for, the T.S.A. told passengers in the terminal — passengers who had been cleared at the security checkpoint and were on their way to catch departing flights — to go back and be screened again.
Once the terminal had been cleared, she said, officials from the T.S.A. and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey conducted “a full and complete sweep of every concourse” to be certain that the man was not hiding somewhere in Terminal C and had not left behind anything improper as he walked through.
She said the decision to close Terminal C and begin the sweep was made by T.S.A. officials at the airport. “Standard procedure would call for a closure of the checkpoints,” she said. But she added that T.S.A. managers at the airport were in contact with agency officials in Washington.
The sweep took “a few hours,” she said. She said the terminal was open again at 11:45 p.m., more than six hours after the man went down the exit lane. But lines remained at the security checkpoints as weary passengers waited to take off their shoes and have their carry-on baggage inspected all over again.
During the four hours that the terminal was closed, the area outside the security checkpoint leading to the airport gates was jammed with passengers who had expected to be in the air by then.
The scene looked like the kind of pileup that happens when bad weather forces flight cancellations, with passengers stretched out on the floor by the ticket counters, using their luggage as pillows. Some straddled the weigh-in machines that ticket agents use to check luggage. Some called home and some sent text messages, warning that they would be late — and might still be on the way home on Monday morning.
Ms. Davis said the man who went through the do-not-enter door was not found, although she said video from security cameras showed that he left the secure area through another checkpoint. She said the T.S.A. was “reviewing the circumstances surrounding the incident in their totality” and would decide “what level of disciplinary action is appropriate” for the officer.
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