Wichita Eisenhower Airport – batteries not included

It’s Christmas, and everybody needs new batteries, even Wichita Eisenhower National Airport.

So when you’re driving to Walgreens on Christmas morning in a quest to pick up some Duracells for your Wii remote controllers, just remember: It could be worse.

The Wichita City Council this week approved spending $25,000 to replace aging batteries in the airport’s data center.

The airport batteries are housed in the ghost world of the mostly abandoned old terminal instead of the gleaming new $160 million terminal next door.

The batteries serve an intermittent but vital function in airport operations. In case of a power failure, they keep the airport’s computer servers humming for the time it takes to get the emergency generators up and running.

“It’s very important to keep those (batteries) within their service life,” said Victor White, airport director. To do that, they must be replaced every five years.

The two battery packs due for replacement are each about the size of a commercial refrigerator, and the airport will have to hire a specialized electrical contractor to change them out, White said.

The contractor will remove the old batteries and take them away for recycling, install the new ones and reinstall the software so the batteries automatically kick in when they’re supposed to, White said.

“It’s more than just the (battery) purchase price,” he said.

This story was originally published December 14, 2016 at 7:25 AM with the headline "Wichita Eisenhower Airport – batteries not included."