In the recent runway excursion at LGA, visibility was bad, and an airport ops vehicle called the tower to inform them of the excursion and that runway 13 was closed, and then that the airport was closed.
The tower is in charge during normal operations. Who has the authority to close a runway/airport? Is this codified somewhere?
This also applies on a smaller scale, as I've heard of such things as chunks of taxiway pavement going missing.
Generally two groups have authority to close a runway (or airport) for an incident/emergency, and if either says it's closed, it's closed:
The airport owner/operator/management.
It's their facility, so if they say it's closed, it's closed.
Specifically it's the persons authorized to issue NOTAMs for the airport who can close a runway (by issuing the NOTAM saying it's closed), but the chain of command for making this decision may vary from airport to airport.
Runways may also be closed by airport administration without issuing a NOTAM (this happens frequently at Brookhaven airport (KHWV) - "Closed Runway" X's will be put out on the crosswind runway when the banner tow operators are set up for pick-up/release on that runway). Often there's a blanket NOTAM about "banner tow ops" or similar that sort-of covers this situation (basically "Expect strange things to be happening because the banner tow people are doing...whatever it is they do".)
The control tower (if one exists).
Whether or not they have the administrative authority to "close" a runway, they certainly have the practical authority to do so by denying anyone clearance to take off/land from it or to enter it, and by issuing NOTAMs indicating that a runway is closed/unusable for some reason.
At an airport like LaGuardia where you have both an FAA Control Tower and a robust airport operations/management group (The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey) a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) or similar agreement is likely in place to ensure that everyone knows who is authorized to do what when, but in cases like this where an aircraft has a runway excursion the course of action is pretty obvious and nobody is going to want aircraft to be moving around on the ground until the situation is under control and safety can be assured.
In addition to the categories listed above, pilots have the authority to close a runway. A braking action nil report will automatically close that runway until the airport operator is satisfied that the condition no longer exists.
This is kind of a gray area, but there is a procedure...
Theoretically, the way a runway is closed is that the airport or airfield operator notifies, in writing, the FAA thirty days ahead of time that a publicly-accessible runway will be closed. The FAA then issues a NOTAM about the closure and the airport puts big X's on the runway at either end. The runway is then closed.
In the event of accident, you obviously cannot "close" a runway this way. The best you can do is warn pilots off it. Since there is no way to "close" a runway on a short-term basis, what happens is that they "close" the entire airport, which is what happened at La Guardia. There is no NOTAM or forewarning during the initial response, so small aircraft can potentially still arrive and they have to be warned off.
Unfortunately, a lot of police and firemen do not understand this, so they try to "close" a runway just by ordering the tower to close it. Often, they do not even do this; they just rush onto the tarmac without even waiting to get permission or calling anyone. Obviously this creates incredibly dangerous situations. The tower (if there is one) reacts to this irregular action by notifying ATC and making constant do-not-land-here warnings on the common channel(s). If there is no tower, hopefully there are people on the ground with radios who do the same thing.
Just as an example of how dangerous this can become: once I was at an airfield with no tower and an aircraft landed short in the trees, getting hung up in some branches. A bunch of state police cars and fire engines literally drove down the runway to get to him like it was a road or something. The danger here is that many smaller aircraft or ultralights (etc) may not have (working) radios or may be on the wrong frequency so they have no idea what is happening. They could have just landed on one of the cop cars and blown up killing everybody. After it happened we called the police and told them how to drive on side of the airfield (not down the runway !!!) and provided them with emergency route maps, but at a certain level it is whistling in the dark, because most emergency personnel do not read these materials.
