‘Clear planning failure’: Heathrow Airport faces the heat as substation fire strands nearly 2 lakh passengers

Heathrow Airport authorities have been accused of “clear failure” after Europe's busiest airport was forced to shut down on Friday due to a fire in a single electricity substation.

Tens of thousands of passengers were left stranded across the world after the Heathrow shutdown prevented flights to fly to and from the airport. Many of them are still stranded even as the operations have begun slowly.

The unprecedented blaze exposes the ‘vulnerability’ in the country's infrastructure, Daily Mail reported.

Heathrow faces heat

Eight long haul flights from the British Airways finally took of Friday evening after a day of chaos and gutted journeys. However, the incident put Heathrow Airport under widespread criticism for its inability to rely on backup power, as per the Daily Mail report.

“Firstly, how is it that critical infrastructure – of national and global importance – is totally dependent on a single power source without an alternative,” Willie Walsh, director-general of global airlines body IATA and a former head of British Airways, was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

“If that is the case – as it seems – then it is a clear planning failure by the airport,” he added.

Walsh complained that Heathrow had once again let its fliers down.

Phil Hewitt, director of energy analysis firm Montel Group, called the situation ‘worrying’.

“This potential lack of resilience at a critical national and international infrastructure site is worrying,” he was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

“An airport as large and as important as Heathrow should not be vulnerable to a single point of failure.”

What happened at Heathrow?

A fire at the North Hyde substation in west London knocked out power to Heathrow Airport for 18 hours on Friday, causing widespread cancellations and rerouting headaches, and stranding roughly 200,000 passengers.

Heathrow gets its electricity from three substations, each of which has a backup transformer. In case of the North Hyde substation, the backup transformer was also lost to the fire.

The blaze took firefighters around seven hours to bring under control.

It affected at least 1,350 flights to and from the airport, according to flight tracking service FlightRadar 24, and the impact was expected to last several days.