Why was Heathrow airport slow to resume operations after substation fire?

Heathrow is coming under growing scrutiny over its decision to close for nearly 24 hours following a fire at a nearby electrical substation, even though it was still able to receive power from other parts of the grid. Senior management at Europe’s busiest airport took the decision to close on Friday as they battled to restore full power to a complex that uses the same amount of electricity as a small city. But John Pettigrew, CE of National Grid which operates Britain’s high-voltage transmission network, told the Financial Times that two other substations serving Heathrow were working throughout the incident, meaning the airport never lost potential access to power. As concerns grow over the resilience of the UK’s critical infrastructure, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on Monday said “there are questions” for airport executives to answer over the scale of disruption. Heathrow has enough diesel generators to power critical operations, including its control tower and runway lights, and passengers were able to safely leave the airport late on Thursday night after the outage was first reported. But its generators do not have the capacity to run the whole airport. Simon Gallagher, managing director of UK Networks Services, a consultancy specialising in power grids, said few other airports have better backup supplies than Heathrow. But he said other industries “are far more resilient”. “The airport industry as a whole has this issue with resilience . . . other industries with even bigger connections ensure they never go off supply,” he said. A nearby data centre run by Ark Data Centres, which is equipped with 12 emergency generators, was also affected by Friday’s substation fire, but says it managed to avoid disruption by switching on its backup supply. “I don’t think that the people buying services off me would buy them without this resilience built in,” said Huw Owen, Ark’s CE. Story has more.<br/>