Iceland Shuts Main Airport After Volcano Eruption

?PARIS — Iceland’s most active volcano began erupting over the weekend, sending billows of ash up to 11 miles into the air on Sunday, and prompting the island nation to close its main international airport to commercial air traffic as a precaution, aviation officials said.

The Icelandic authorities said that as of 8:30 a.m. local time, Reykjavík-Keflavik International Airport was closed to all inbound and outbound air traffic.

"The ash is covering up all of Iceland,” said Hjordís Gudmundsdottir, a spokeswoman for Isavia, Iceland’s air navigation services provider. "We are trying to identify some holes in it and to use them to allow some flights, but it’s not looking very good right now.”

Overnight, Iceland’s civil protection agency said it had imposed a no-fly zone of 120 nautical miles around the Grimsv?tn volcano in southeast Iceland.

Meteorologists said the prevailing winds were expected to blow the volcanic ash in a generally westward direction through the rest of this week — most likely avoiding a repeat of the widespread shutdowns of European airports that grounded more than 100,000 flights in April and May 2010.

Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based agency that coordinates air traffic management across the region, said it was monitoring the situation but it appeared there would be no wider threat to trans-Atlantic or European air travel at least for the next 24 hours.

Ms. Gudmundsdottir of Isavia said Iceland’s aviation authorities planned an update on the situation at around noon. For the time being, Iceland’s three other international airports remained open, she said.Iceland officials said roughly 30 flight arrivals and departures had originally been scheduled at Keflavik airport on Sunday.Iceland’s Met Office weather agency reported heavy ash fall near the volcano itself.

Grimsv?tn, a volcano of 1,725 meters, is located beneath an uninhabited icecap, Vatnajokull, in southeast Iceland.

Iceland’s civil protection agency said the volcano began erupting Saturday. The authorities have closed the main road to the eruption site and advised people living near the volcano to stay indoors or, if they must go outside, to wear protective masks and goggles.

Grimsv?tn is one of the most active volcanoes in Iceland, with at least 60 eruptions over the past 800 years. Past eruptions, most recently in 1983 and 1998, have been relatively small, however, and?have not posed a direct threat to the population.

Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, one of the island’s largest, erupted violently in April 2010 and sent numerous bursts of ash into the high into the atmosphere for several weeks, disrupting air traffic in Northern Europe, with ripple effects far beyond. The aviation authorities in dozens of European countries moved quickly to close their airspace and ground airplanes in order to prevent possible damage to jet engines.

But due to limited information about what levels of ash density were considered to be safe, the authorities were slow to re-open their airspace — resulting in the worst peacetime air travel disruption in history that cost airlines hundreds of millions of dollars.

European aviation regulators have since taken a series of steps to better coordinate their response to volcanic eruptions.

In April, Eurocontrol, the European Aviation Safety Agency and the International Civil Aviation Organization staged a two-day joint exercise with more than 70 airlines and more than a dozen air traffic control bodies to test their updated procedures.

The exercise, which in fact simulated a significant ash cloud event from the Grimsv?tn volcano, determined that more than 70 percent of scheduled European flights would have been able to take off as scheduled under the new procedures — three times more than during the Eyjafjallaj?kull eruption.

View the original article here

Airport Screeners Need Runoff to Pick a Union

 

Federal officials said 8,369 security screeners, who are employees of the Transportation Security Administration, had voted to join the American Federation of Government Employees, while 8,095 had voted to join the National Treasury Employees Union. The vote against unionizing was 3,111.

Since none of the three choices received a majority, the screeners will choose between the two unions in a runoff election that will omit the option of not unionizing. The winning union will represent the nation’s 44,000 T.S.A. screeners in contract negotiations. The runoff will be held over the next two months.

Labor leaders were pleased that 84 percent of the screeners who voted favored a union, saying it showed that many government employees still wanted to bargain collectively, even when public employees are on the defensive in places like Wisconsin and Ohio, where state leaders have largely curtailed the right of public sector unions to bargain.

Throughout the campaign, the federation of government employees insisted it had an advantage because 12,000 screeners already belong to that union, even though they did not have the ability to bargain until recently. But the Treasury employees’ union predicted that it would win because it already represented many Customs and Border Protection employees who work at airports with the screeners. The leaders of both unions voiced confidence they would win the runoff.

The federation of government employees says screeners should vote for it because it emphasizes bottom-up unionism and belongs to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s main labor federation, while the Treasury employees union says it warrants support because it represents professionals and provides excellent legal support.

The results of the vote were announced by the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which conducted the six-week election. Each airport screener was given a personal identification number, which allowed voting by computer or telephone.

Until recently screeners did not have a right to bargain collectively. But in February, the T.S.A.’s administrator, John S. Pistole, reversed the position of his Republican predecessor and gave employees the ability to bargain collectively.

Mr. Pistole said screeners could bargain over policies on shifts, dress code, break time and awards. But the union could not negotiate wages, benefits, job qualifications, discipline standards or anything related to national security. He also said the agency’s workers would not be allowed to strike or engage in a slowdown and would be fired for doing so.

Many Republican leaders have said that allowing screeners to bargain collectively would jeopardize national security, warning that strikes and work slowdowns could cripple airports and result in insufficient security checks.

After the vote results were announced, Mr. Pistole said, “The safety of the traveling public remains our top priority, and I have made clear we will not negotiate on security.”

T.S.A. officials say unionization will improve screeners’ morale and will in turn improve productivity and service to the public.