Unscheduled absences of airport security officers nationwide hit a record 10 percent on Sunday, compared to 3.1 percent one year ago, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said Monday.
The absence rate of TSA screeners has been going up ahead of and during this holiday weekend, when many workers have Monday off in observation of the Martin Luther King Day. On Friday and Saturday, unscheduled absence rate was 7 percent and 8 percent respectively.
"Some airports experienced longer than usual wait times," the TSA said, noting that the national average wait times are within the normal 30 minutes for standard lanes. With 45 minutes, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport topped the list of maximum wait times for security checks at major U.S. airports on Sunday.
One security checkpoint at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport was shut down twice over the weekend due to "excessive callouts," and the TSA said Monday that it was operational again.
To copy with the high absence rate of airport security staff, the TSA has been calling in National Deployment Force officers, who usually help with staffing shortages during natural disasters, to support major airports, including the Newark Liberty International airport, LaGuardia Airport in New York, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
The TSA said Friday that it expected "a high volume" of travelers this holiday weekend, estimating that between Friday and Monday, more than 8 million passengers will be screened at security checkpoints nationwide, an increase of 10.8 percent from the same period last year.
The 51,000 TSA screeners are among the some 420,000 government employees who are deemed essential, and have been forced to work without pay since the shutdown, which has lasted for about a month.
