Airmen help repair runway lights

  • Published
  • By 1st Lt. Kelley Jeter
  • 380th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
SOUTHWEST ASIA (AFPN) --  Usually when the lights go out in an office, it is an inconvenience; a work stoppage at worst. When the lights go out on the runway, as they did here July 30, the entire mission threatens to come to a screeching halt, creating a domino effect all over the area.

It was shortly before lunchtime when Tech. Sgt. Rodney Lewis and Staff Sgt. Luke Shelby received the call that the runway edge lights were out at the forward-deployed location. The host-nation military needed Sergeants Lewis and Shelby, both assigned to the 380th Expeditionary Civil Engineer Squadron, to help fix the problem.

“There were only two guys working their staff at the time,” said Sergeant Lewis, electrical systems superintendent. “They were between contracts and their formerly 18-person shop was temporarily down to only two people.”

Though the two local technicians assigned to the shop were more than qualified to handle it, the enormity of the problem and the urgency of the issue required more manpower than they currently had.

“We supplied the brawn,” said Sergeant Shelby, the electrical systems noncommissioned officer in charge.

About 13,000 feet of lights were out, and jets were in the air scheduled to land after dark. Alternate plans to divert to other area bases were already in the works.

Officials from the 380th Expeditionary Operations Support Squadron worked directly with the host nation, and acted as liaison, requesting help from the base civil engineers.

Electrical systems shop workers had their work cut out for them, as they dug in for another long day at the end of what had already been a 96-hour work week. The culprit was an aging isolation transformer which had caught fire, causing several hundred feet of cable to burn.

It effectively broke the entire runway circuit, similar to a string of holiday lights -- when one goes out, they all go out.

Discovering the problem and engineering the fix was simple enough, but coming up with the manpower to accomplish it was the true challenge.

Thankfully, the solution was as close as the phone, as the other members of the electrical systems shop stepped up, as well as Airmen in the barrier maintenance and power production shops; all part of the 380th ECES’s operations flight.

“They all jumped at the chance to come out and help us with this project,” said Sergeant Lewis.

Within several hours, these enthusiastic Airmen pulled between 600 and 800 feet of cable, re-established the circuit, and got the lights on by 5:30 p.m.

It was all in a day’s work for these Airmen, as they recall how busy they have been since arriving here.

“The (workload) here is easily five times heavier than my shop back home,” said Sergeant Lewis, who is deployed here from the 22nd Civil Engineer Squadron at McConnell Air Force Base, Kan. “The electrical infrastructure here is just so challenging, and more prone to going down, keeping us busy.”

“The combination of American wiring and circuits, local wiring, and sometimes even British wiring, creates all sorts of issues we don’t typically deal with back at our home bases,” said Sergeant Shelby, deployed here from the 31st Civil Engineer Squadron at Aviano Air Base, Italy.