NIPSCO workers caused damage Sept. 9 at the Warsaw Municipal Airport while doing work for the Federal Aviation Administration, but now NIPSCO’s insurance company is denying the claim.
At the Board of Aviation Commissioners meeting Tuesday at the airport, Manager Nick King reported, “We did get the final bill for the lines that were cut during the NIPSCO project for the FAA out here. NIPSCO is currently refusing to pay that bill, even though it was their negligence to come and talk to me because I had all the diagrams waiting for them.”
He said that bill is around $10,500 and they’re trying to get NIPSCO to pay because of damages to the airport’s equipment when the utility was cutting the line to the FAA’s new remote radio transmitter.
“We are starting that process, but it may be a few months before we get that resolved,” King said.
Board President Jay Rigdon said, “If you have to get (city attorney) Mr. (Mike) Valentine involved, get Mr. Valentine involved.”
King replied Valentine has a copy of it.
After the meeting, King explained, “We have a vault at the airport and that vault – we have one line in and several lines out – and it’s what controls all of the lighting at the airport.”
NIPSCO was installing a new radio for the FAA so that pilots could contact Fort Wayne on the ground in Warsaw for their flight plane clearance. In installing power to that building, NIPSCO cut all of the lines from the airport’s building to the rest of the airport.
“Pretty much, we had no lights. No control. No monitoring equipment. Nothing,” King said.
He said luckily they found out about it early enough in the day that they were able to have Michiana Electric, the airport’s power company, come out and get power restored before the night.
“There were no delays or interruptions, but it’s still a really, really large bill to foot when it wasn’t our fault that they cut the lines,” King said.
He said NIPSCO referred the airport to NIPSCO’s insurance claims company, but they’re currently denying the claim because they contend NIPSCO wasn’t negligent, saying NIPSCO’s engineers notified the proper people. King said that’s not correct.
“The FAA engineer who’s involved is out of Chicago. The form he has to fill out for that type of project – it’s an FAA rule that there has to be four days written notice, four business days of written notice for them to do that, because he has to be physically here to manage the project, in case that happens he can document everything. And he had absolutely no notice whatsoever. So it wasn’t even an airport project. It was an FAA project at the airport. And NIPSCO didn’t notify the FAA that they were coming and that’s why it happened.”
During discussion of claims in the meeting, King also pointed out the NIPSCO bill of $1,466.96 was a “little bit elevated” over the past month.
“That’s from being without our pilot-controlled lighting when NIPSCO hit our lines. They broke that radio unit, so we had to have the lights on longer than (normal). We just had to have them on all the time instead of part of the time. That caused the electric bill to go up,” King said.
In another matter, Ken Ross, of NGC Corp., airport engineer consultant, reported that on Nov. 4 FAA Airport District Office Project Manager Rob Esquivel visited the airport.
Board Secretary Gene Zale got to remind Esquivel that the airport’s been working on the power line relocation “for about 30 years now with no success,” Ross said. “He made it clear to Rob how important this was.”
The overhead power lines run perpendicular to the runway. When a plane takes off to the East, those lines are “very, very close to where you are,” King explained after the meeting. If a plane should take off and not get high enough in time for some reason, those lines become a hazard very quick.
“To lower those to the height they need to be, that is a very, very large project involving six different towers that they would have to lower down. It’s just a very large project we’ve been working on since the late ’70s,” King said.
Ross told the board there was a good discussion with the FAA, and at the end of it Esquivel was given all the historical information about “how we got three or four different options from the power company and how all that went about. We reminded him we’ve had documents in there since March of this year and October of last year waiting for their review and approval so that we could get that grant closed out and everything.”
Esquivel said he would carry that message back to the FAA, Ross reported.
Ross said he thought the meeting was a good one, and they talked about if there was a better way to fund the project with the power company because splitting funding up over two years could be problematic.
“We really would like to see this funded and compiled in one year if we could in 2017. And they said they would see what they could do,” Ross said.
King said another good thing about the meeting was that Esquivel could actually see the airport in person. He was able to not only see the amount of traffic at the airport, but also the different kinds of planes that use the airport.
“That really tied in back into we’re not just some small country airport that’s asking for these things because we want it, we truly have the need and justification for these projects,” King said.
Ross said he shared with Esquivel that over the last 20 years, the Warsaw Airport only received $28,000 in discretionary money from the FAA.
“He really raised his eyebrows on that, that an airport this size really hasn’t received a lot of what we call discretionary, which competes nationally. This airport is well overdue and we don’t think it’s that much of a stretch. This airport is the fifth highest in the state when it comes to economic impact. We believe we got the message to him,” Ross said.
On the Airport Layout Plan, Ross told the board the forecasting chapter was finished for the ALP update. It’s in the FAA’s hands, who is working on it now.
Another thing they’re discussing with the FAA is what to do with the intersecting runways, Ross said.
Ross told Barry Lintz, Biomet, that at some point the airport would want a letter from him stating how often he uses the runway and how he needs it at full lengths “because the option that they would prefer to do, that meets all their safety criteria, is move the thresholds, those 300 feet north of the safety area, and remove all that pavement, which basically leaves you with a 3,000 foot crossway runway, which is practically worthless,” Ross said.
He said they need to make a big case of why that’s impractical. Lintz told Ross to just let him know when he needed the letter.
Ross informed the board they did have an invoice for a pay request from NGC Corp. for the Airport Layout Plan grant. The invoice is for $12,800, with the FAA paying for $11,520 of it, State of Indiana funds paying $640 and local funds covering the other $640. The board approved the pay request.
The next board meeting is at 5:15 p.m. Dec. 8.
(Story By The Times Union)
