A runway at LaGuardia Airport was shut down on Wednesday evening after crews discovered a depression in the pavement, disrupting flights at one of New York's busiest airports. The Port Authority closed runways 4 and 22 starting at 5 o'clock to assess the problem and try to carry out any necessary repairs overnight.
The depression was found during a routine morning airfield inspection. Crews use ground penetrating radar to examine the pavement, and during that check they identified a two inch depression on a taxiway adjacent to runways 4 and 22. What might have been a minor finding quickly became a bigger concern because of where it was located.
That location is significant. It is the exact same spot where a sinkhole opened on May 20th, about a month ago, an event that also forced the area to shut down. The reappearance of a problem in the same stretch of pavement so soon after the first one prompted officials to act cautiously this time around.
Port Authority officials said they were proactively shutting runways 4 and 22 while they assess the situation and make repairs. They closed the runways starting in the early evening and said they were optimistic the work could be finished by the following morning, though the runway would remain out of service throughout the night.
The impact on travelers was immediate. Within roughly 40 minutes of the closure, arrival delays of about 59 minutes were already being reported. Because runways 4 and 22 intersect and are central to how LaGuardia operates, taking them out of service amounts to a major problem for the airport.
With those runways closed, all operations were shifted over to runway 13-31, with both arrivals and departures funneled onto that single strip. The Port Authority recommended that anyone scheduled to fly out of LaGuardia on Wednesday night contact their carrier directly, warning passengers to expect delays and cancellations.
The timing echoed the earlier closure in another way as well. Like the May incident, this disruption unfolded on a day that already carried the threat of thunderstorms, compounding the strain on a busy airport. Officials said they hoped to reopen the runways by Thursday morning once the assessment and any repairs were complete.