It appears that London’s Heathrow Airport is partially back up and running after 18 hours in the dark due to a fire at a critical electrical substation powering the facility. The U.K. Daily Mail reports on the staggering statistics,
At least 220,000 passengers have been left stranded in Britain and around the world after an electrical fire shut the airport for at least 24 hours – with the level of global travel chaos sparked by the outage being compared to 9/11.
Even with at least five other commercial airports in the greater London area, and with the airport operational again, the loss of the Heathrow hub will take days to recover from.
Preliminary reports indicate nothing suspicious about the substation fire.
The design principle here is to not allow a critical system to have a single point of failure. Because, inevitably, it will fail at some point, and then disaster will ensue. A second substation with the capability of carrying enough load to allow the airport to continue at least minimal operations should a long-term goal.
But the U.K. Sun reports that the systems that were there, worked as expected,
Heathrow’s boss apologised on Friday, admitting backup generators were never powerful enough to run the airport as mass cancellations ensued.
Thomas Woldbye described the blaze which knocked out an electricity substation as “as big as it gets for our airport”.
The Sun continues,
Thomas Woldbye said: “We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.”
“This is unprecedented, it’s never happened before,” Mr Woldbye added.
But it was always going to happen. The Daily Mail touches on a possible root cause,
A British MP today claimed that the drive for Net Zero led to the complete shutdown of Heathrow Airport.
Reform deputy leader Richard Tice claimed in a GB News interview that an aviation expert told him that Heathrow is moving from diesel back-up generators to biomass.
There will be inquiries and then inquiries into the inquiries on this incident. At the end of the day, the purpose of a system is what it does, not what was intended. Either the airport is in the aviation business, or it’s in the business of saving the planet. The two missions are not compatible.
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