Los Angeles International Airport is an “extremely challenged” facility that lacks the proper equipment and infrastructure to handle the type of massive computer meltdown that left more than 17,300 passengers stranded last month, according to the airport’schief executive.

The Whittier Daily News reported that the comments from Gina Marie Lindsay, executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, came just days after a glitch in a single laptop computer shut down the US Customs and Border Protection screening system at LAX, followed by a power outage that knocked down the system for a second time inless than 24 hours.

“Under the best of circumstances, LAX is a facility that is extremely challenged,” Lindsay told the Los Angeles City Council. “We lack the suffi cient numbers and types of aircraft parking gates, we lack the terminal facilities and our concessions are undersized by about 50 percent,” she said. “There is simply no margin, no margin for irregular operations of the nature and duration we experienced.”

A network interface card on a single desktop computer was blamed for shutting down the entire U.S. Customs screening system at LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal. The network interface card allows computers to connect to a local area network that permits customs agents to run background checks and passport numbersof people entering the country.

The outages occurred during the airport’s peak operating month and on the busiest days of the week, Lindsay said. The timing couldn’t have been worse, she said, calling the situation a“perfect storm.”

US customs offi cials have told LAX executives that they plan to buy 190 additional laptop computers with backup screening software in about two months, followed by a complete overhaul of the system by the end of 2008.