Heathrow warned of power supply risk days before fire disrupted 300,000 passengers

The Heathrow boss has been questioned over the airport’s handling of a power cut following the huge substation fire.

Around 300,000 passengers faced disruption in the UK and abroad when Heathrow Airport closed following an overnight blaze at a nearby substation on March 21.

Heathrow – the UK’s and Europe’s busiest airport – closed for hours until about 6pm on Friday while thousands of homes were left without power in the area.

Counterterrorism detectives confirmed last week the matter is no longer ‘a potentially criminal matter’ after they were called in to investigate the fire.

Now, Heathrow has come under more pressure from some of the world’s biggest airlines after accusations that the airport was warned about its power supply days before the outage.

Here is a roundup of the key takeaways from the transport select committee today.

Heathrow was warned about power risks, airline executive says

Today’s Heathrow meeting saw the blame game continue between the airport, National Grid and the airlines.

Nick Wicking, the chief executive of Heathrow Airline Operators Committee representing the airlines, said he had raised concerns with the Heathrow director on March 15 and with the chief operating officer and chief customer officer two days before the outage.

Alarm was raised after ‘theft of wire and cable,’ which switched off runway lights on one occasion, he said.

Heathrow says staying open would have been ‘disastrous’

Heathrow’s CEO Thomas Woldbye went on the defensive in front of the MPs, saying staying open during the outage would have been ‘disastrous.’

He said staying open would not have been safe.

He explained what the risks might have been: ‘If we had not done that, we would have had thousands of passengers stranded at the airport at high-risk to personal injury, gridlocked roads around the airport, because don’t forget 65,000 houses and other institutions were powered down.

‘Traffic lights didn’t work, just to give you an example, many things didn’t work. Parts of the civil infrastructure didn’t work.

‘So the risk of having literally tens of thousands of people stranded at the airport, where we have would have nowhere to put them, we could not process them, would have been a disastrous scenario.’

Mr Wicking said the airport should have opened earlier on the day after, while Woldbye insisted that although T5 may have had lights on and appeared operational, earlier reopening could have resulted in injuries.

More than £1 billion needed to make Heathrow fully resilient

The big topic of conversation is Heathrow’s resilience after questions were raised about why the airport was not able to stay open and why it doesn’t have its own power station.

Mr Woldbye said: ‘If we were to refit a ring round Heathrow that would give you that full resilience, the best estimates of our engineers is that would exceed a billion pounds to refit today.’

Are Heathrow expansion plans affected?

Heathrow is pushing for approval for its controversial expansion plans, which would see a third runway and an upgrade to Terminals 2 and 5 as part of the £14,000,000,000 project.

Mr Woldbye said Heathrow will need ‘double the amount of energy’ for the expansion, adding that the airport has applied for a connection to the National Grid directly.

However, the airlines said they are ‘not sure about the foundations of Heathrow as it stands at the moment’ after a string of issues, Mr Wicking said.

This included ‘thousands of bags misconnecting’ during 82 baggage system issues last year, he said.

The Heathrow airlines suggested previously they might take legal action over the losses during the closure.

However, the parties are likely to want to avoid going to court as ‘a lot of dirty washing would come out in court,’ aviation expert Bernard Lavelle told Metro previously.

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