London,Ā Mar 22: A fire at an electrical substation knocked out power to Heathrow Airport for most of Friday, forcing Europe’s busiest hub to shut down for roughly 18 hours, causing widespread cancellations and rerouting headaches, and stranding roughly 2,00,000 passengers.The blaze started just before midnight on Thursday at a substation about 3.2 km from the airport and took firefighters around seven hours to bring under control. Authorities said they found no evidence that it was suspicious, and the London Fire Brigade said its investigation would focus on the electrical distribution equipment at the substation.
The fire knocked out power to Heathrow and thousands of homes in the area. 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, as passengers try to reschedule their trips and airlines work to reposition their planes and crews
After power was restored, a British Airways jet touched down just before sunset on Friday after Heathrow lifted its closure order. Further arrivals followed, including a short flight from Manchester in northwest England.
A British Airways flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia departed from Heathrow just before 9 pm. British Airways says it will run eight long-haul flights on Friday night. The airport plans to operate full schedule on Saturday.
Residents in west London described hearing a large explosion, followed by a fireball and clouds of smoke, when the blaze ripped through the substation.
About 120 flights were in the air when the closure was announced. Some turned around and others were diverted to Gatwick Airport outside London, Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris or Ireland’s Shannon Airport, tracking services showed.
Lawrence Hayes was most of the way to London from New York when Virgin Atlantic announced the plane was being diverted to Glasgow.
āIt was a red-eye flight and I’d already had a full day, so I don’t even know how long I’ve been up for,ā Hayes told the BBC as he was getting off the plane in Scotland. “Luckily I managed to get hold of my wife and she’s kindly booked me a train ticket to get back to Euston (station in London), but it’s going to be an incredibly long day.ā
Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports for international travel, and saw 83.9 million passengers last year.
Friday’s disruption was one of the most serious since the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed clouds of ash into the atmosphere and shut Europe’s airspace for days.
It’s too early to know for sure what sparked the blaze, but the Metropolitan Police force said counterterrorism detectives were leading the investigation because of their ability to find the cause quickly and because of the location of the electrical substation fire and its impact on critical national infrastructure.
The force said that “after initial assessment, we are not treating this incident as suspicious.”
Heathrow said its backup power supply designed for emergencies worked as expected, but it wasn’t enough to run the whole airport. It said it had no choice but to close the airport for most of the day.
The airport’s CEO, Thomas Woldbye, rejected suggestions that Heathrow didn’t have adequate contingency plans, saying the incident was āunprecedented.
“Contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100 per cent and this is one of them,” he said.
Nevertheless, the fallout from the fire led to criticism that Britain is ill-prepared to deal with disasters.
āThe UK’s critical national infrastructure is not sufficiently hardened for anywhere near the level it would need to be at to give us confidence this won’t happen again,ā said Alan Mendoza, the executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, a security think tank.