As those reading the news during the day will have noticed, fire at an electricity sub-station which serves one of the world's busiest airports at London Heathrow cut all power to the airport this morning forcing it to shut down all its operations until midnight tonight UK time at the very earliest. The blaze also caused damage to the backup transformer and put it out of action as well. Houses around the airport have also been without power. I see from the latest BBC bulletin that power has been restored to three of the terminals, but not yet to Terminals 2 and 4. Yet the airport remains totally closed. Incoming flights have been diverted to airport around around the UK and northern Europe. But many have also been advised not to leave their departure airports. 

The UK's counter terrorism unit has been brought in to investigate the damage, even though the initial view is that this was an accident and not sabotage. If it was an accident, the airlines will be up in arms for passengers travelling on European airlines are entitled to considerable compensation for delayed flights. With overnight cancellations, affected passengers should be provided with hotel accommodation, meals and local transport. But understandably all Heathrow hotels are now full to overflowing.

The question everyone is asking is: how can such a vital piece of the UK's transport infrastructure be dependent on just one source of power? Even when power resumes and the aorport operations are back up and running, expect days of chaos for airlines and passengers. If you are due to travel out of Heathrow in the next few days, find alternative flights from other airports - if you can! Good luck!

12 minutes ago, PeterRS said:

power has been restored to three of the terminals, but not yet to Terminals 2 and 4.

 

Only two . Terminal 1 closed nearly a decade ago.

2 hours ago, thaiophilus said:

Only two . Terminal 1 closed nearly a decade ago.

That shows how I have avoided Heathrow for well over a decade until my most recent trip. It's an airport I loathe having to navigate 😂

19 hours ago, PeterRS said:

 

The question everyone is asking is: how can such a vital piece of the UK's transport infrastructure be dependent on just one source of power?...

You'll be amazed as to the number of SPOF's (Single Points of Failure) large organisations have. Whether by design or accidental operational incidents.

Especially in Communications Companies, ie BT, Vodafone etc.

Most issues caused by bean-counters, as full autonomous switch over of geographical dispersed infrastructure costs a shed load of money. While regulations, especially in the Finance Sector force Enterprises to invest in DR (Disaster Recovery) or BC (Business Continuity), the impact of Reputational Damage is always below cost on a Risk Register.

For those of you who bank with the blue coloured high street bank, pray their main data center doesn't go down, as their primary backup site is at Heathrow! 

Just found out, the backup generators were diesel based, so were resently replaced with biomass generators and a brand new auto-switching solution so that Heathrow could move towards their Net-Zero target. They failed, hence the black out.

Sometimes the old and well trusted solutions work best, despite a bit of black smoke.