Heathrow airport resumes some flights after fire closure leaves thousands stranded worldwide
Counterterror police investigate blaze that caused power cut, upsetting travel plans of up to 300,000 passengers
The first flights landed at Heathrow on Friday evening after the airport closed for more than 15 hours, leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded worldwide due to a fire at a nearby power substation.
The airport’s chief executive apologised to everyone who suffered disruption and defended the response to the “unprecedented” loss of power.
Counterterrorism police are probing the blaze that upset the journeys of up to 300,000 passengers worldwide and caused chaos for airline schedules. Around 1,300 flights in and out of Heathrow – from Cairo to Sydney – were cancelled.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander said there would be lessons to learn and she was in touch with home secretary Yvette Cooper over the disruption.
Thomas Woldbye, the boss of Heathrow – Europe’s busiest airport – said the fire at an electricity substation in Hayes in the early hours was “as big as it gets for our airport” and insisted: “We cannot guard ourselves 100 per cent.”
He revealed a backup transformer had failed and power supplies had to be restructured to restore enough electricity for what was effectively a “mid-sized city”.
The west London airport initially announced it would be closed all day Friday but later said repatriation flights and a handful of British Airways long-haul flights would resume in the evening. Bosses say a full schedule will run on Saturday.
Questions about how the fire caused so much disruption will need to be answered, Downing Street said, but insisted dealing with the incident was the priority.
A No 10 spokesperson said: “There are questions to answer. We expect those questions to be answered but our clarity right now is on this incident being appropriately dealt with.”
They added it “wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect checks on resilience” were being carried out at other major airports.
Mr Woldbye said: “Of course, we [will] look at anything we can learn from this, but I should say our backup systems have worked the way they should, our crisis management has worked the way it should.
“This just takes time when we have an incident of this major severity.”
Asked whether there was a weak point in Heathrow’s power system, he said: “You can say that but of course, contingencies of certain sizes, we cannot guard ourselves against 100 per cent, and this is one of them.”
Heathrow is the UK’s largest airport, with more than 83.9 million passengers travelling through its terminals last year.
The disruption is believed to be the worst there since December 2010, when thousands of Christmas getaway passengers camped in the terminals because of cancellations caused by snow.
The inferno left Heathrow and 67,000 homes in Hayes and Hounslow without power as 70 firefighters tackled the blaze from midnight into Friday morning.
The counterterrorism investigation into the fire is at an early stage but there is so far “no indication of foul play”, the Metropolitan Police confirmed.
Commander Simon Messinger, who is leading the Met Police response to the incident, said: “The investigation into the cause of the fire remains in its early stages. After initial assessment, we are not treating this incident as suspicious, although inquiries do remain ongoing.
“Due to the location of the substation and the impact this incident has had on critical national infrastructure, the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command are leading our inquiries into this matter.”
London Fire Brigade later said the fire “is believed to be non-suspicious” and the investigation will “focus on the electrical distribution equipment”.
Passengers on board Qantas flights to Heathrow from Singapore and Perth were diverted to Paris before taking buses to London, the airline said.
Among those whose holiday plans were ruined were Warwickshire couple Nicola and Justin Sidwell, who were set to fly off to Tokyo for a dream holiday.
“We’re now stuck in limbo,” Mr Sidwell told The Independent from the couple’s hotel room. “We have been sitting in our hotel waiting to hear something from British Airways since 5am. It is a nightmare.”
Ellen Deasy, 29, was surprised by her cousin Jenna with a holiday to Venice for her 30th birthday but had to settle on Portsmouth instead.
With dreams of gelato and gondoliers dashed by the fire, she told The Independent: “We woke up at about 3.30am and the first thing we saw were pictures of this fireball and the headlines.
“We were planning on riding the gondolas, eating some pasta and having some ice cream, but now we are going to Portsmouth.
“I was so excited. It would have been a dream birthday but now my thirties haven’t started in the way I hoped.”
National Grid, which owns the damaged substation, said it did not know what caused the “very, very unusual” fire.
“We don’t actually know anything at this stage about what’s caused it,” National Grid president Alice Delahunty told The Times.
She apologised for the power cut, saying the fire had caused more knock-on effects than would be expected.
Mr Woldbye said the airport had three substations, each with a backup transformer. “The backup transformer in this case also went, and then we had to restructure the supply. So we’re not out of power but we have to restructure our power supply.
“To do that we have to close down systems – that is safety procedure, we will not go around that.”
He described the decision to close the airport as a very difficult one that they took quite early.
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