Tens of thousands of travelers were facing cancellations and chaos on Friday as a power outage caused by a fire near London’s Heathrow Airport forced the closure of one of the world’s busiest flight hubs.
Heathrow officials said the airport would remain closed until midnight, but travel disruptions were expected to last into the weekend. The outage raised stark questions about the resilience of Britain’s largest airport and why it appeared to be so reliant on a single electricity substation, where the giant fire broke out overnight.
Ed Miliband, Britain’s energy secretary, said early Friday that there was, at the time, “no suggestion there is any foul play,” but added that “we don’t yet have a real understanding of what caused the fire.” Later on Friday, London’s Metropolitan Police Service said that counterterrorism specialists were leading the investigation into the cause of the blaze, “given the location of the substation and the impact this incident has had on critical national infrastructure.”
Mr. Miliband said that the outage had also knocked at least one backup generator. The inability to quickly restore power after such a major outage is likely to be at the center of questions about the reliability of Britain’s infrastructure.
A Heathrow representative said in a statement that significant delays would be expected in the coming days and warned that “passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport reopens.” As many as 290,000 passengers could be affected by the closure, according to Cirium, an aviation data company.
Credit:nytimes