Narrative:

This report is describing an unsafe combination of positions during a flow change from south to north. I relieved the arrival west controller. I was informed that a flow change had been initiated; and I asked are the feeders split. I was told no. I then spoke out that the situation was obviously in need of a split. I was holding multiple aircraft in the airspace that were waiting for north flow and still working airplanes landing in south flow. Departures were climbing through the airspace that I was holding the north traffic. I again yelled out why isn't this being split off. I then had a 4 corner feed of north traffic that came in stacked because center was holding due to the flow change. I had to do multiple coordination with the departure controller to miss their traffic as well as miss my own. I had multiple aircraft constantly checking in on multiple frequencies blocking a lot of my control instructions. This was one of the most dangerous things I've been involved in. I reviewed the radar replay and verified that there was never a loss of separation; but some of them were very very very close.I recommend that during a flow change it should be mandatory that the arrivals not be combined. I recommend that staffing be increased so we have enough people to work the traffic. The staffing situation is horrible. Multiple times we don't have enough people to split positions in a timely manner. We are running the most traffic we have ever run and with the fewest number of people we have ever had. That makes no sense. Unfortunately I believe a serious accident will take place here very soon due to lack of open positions due to staffing.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: S46 TRACON Controller reported their sector reached an unsafe workload level during a runway change operation because they were working combined sectors.

Narrative: This report is describing an unsafe combination of positions during a flow change from south to north. I relieved the Arrival West Controller. I was informed that a flow change had been initiated; and I asked are the feeders split. I was told no. I then spoke out that the situation was obviously in need of a split. I was holding multiple aircraft in the airspace that were waiting for north flow and still working airplanes landing in south flow. Departures were climbing through the airspace that I was holding the north traffic. I again yelled out why isn't this being split off. I then had a 4 corner feed of north traffic that came in stacked because center was holding due to the flow change. I had to do multiple coordination with the Departure Controller to miss their traffic as well as miss my own. I had multiple aircraft constantly checking in on multiple frequencies blocking a lot of my control instructions. This was one of the most dangerous things I've been involved in. I reviewed the radar replay and verified that there was never a loss of separation; but some of them were very very very close.I recommend that during a flow change it should be mandatory that the arrivals not be combined. I recommend that staffing be increased so we have enough people to work the traffic. The staffing situation is horrible. Multiple times we don't have enough people to split positions in a timely manner. We are running the most traffic we have ever run and with the fewest number of people we have ever had. That makes no sense. Unfortunately I believe a serious accident will take place here very soon due to lack of open positions due to staffing.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.