A strong chemical smell forces a 1-hour flight halt at 4 major DC-area airports

Some big data/communications/computer thing for the region was shut/went down because a chemical smell. That’s why it hit all 4 airports. Edit: no permanent damage/no one hurt Edit2: apparently people were hurt, but I haven’t read that anywhere.

"... halted all flights on Friday evening for over an hour because of a strong chemical smell that was impeding air traffic controllers..." "The smell was coming from Potomac TRACON, Duffy wrote, referring to a terminal radar approach control facility that manages air traffic." So I think the "air traffic control facility" can be at least colloquially described as a "control tower." But you do you.

I mean that if you have a piece of critical infrastructure, whether it is people or machines, you need redundancy --- for example having them spread over two different places, so that if something unpleasant happens to one of them (whether it is maintenance, broken microwave in the kitchen or something serious), the other site can take over. Note that this does not strictly mean having twice the number of sites overall --- there are (about) 24 TRACON sites, splitting the responsibility for each TRA across two sites would be a good start. (I am sure this is not _that_ simple, but consider that others _do_ have that --- for example the Swiss Skyguide has two Area Control Centers for LSAS (Switzerland FIR).) Generally, for things that are not strictly bound to a specific locality (like a tower), having one building go offline should not impact service. (No, I do not work in aviation, but I _do_ work in reliability.)