How was a single fire brought to Europe’s busiest airport?

It seems surprising that a single fire at the power source shuts down one of the world’s busiest airports.

The disintegration on Friday for thousands of passengers and millions of pound trade goods has inspired many questions on the flexibility of the major infrastructure of the UK.

Disaster recovery plans awaken the top brass of many organizations at night.

Banks, data centers, stock exchanges, hospitals, all have casual plans.

“How is it that significant infrastructure – national and global importance – completely depends on a single power source without an alternative?”, International Air Transport Association Director General Willy Walsh said, which represents Airlines.

He said that the shutdown was the result of “clear plan failure”.

Heathrow is actually near more than one source of electrical, however, a national grid interiors stated to the BBC, but the fire damaged the “particularly important bit” that fire.

This meant that the back-up system proved to be ineffective for such a landscape when the blaze burst through the substation, which is used by the national grid to convert high voltage electricity for use to use high voltage electricity for use.

This is a process that produces too much heat that decomposes using flammable cooling oils. This light was caught in this example. The exact reason is not yet known, but the counter terrorism police is looking at whether someone was playing dishonestly.

Heathro uses more energy as a small town, so it is not possible for back-up power to run its operation safely.

A source in Heathro said he had back-up options for some major systems, but it took time to kickstart the alternative power supply for the entire airport.

It is necessary to check the system to ensure that they are working properly.

A heathro source said that its back-up diesel generator and uninterrupted power supply is operated as expected.

The problem was with the National Grid, the source said, thousands of houses were left without electricity only without airport.

According to the energy analysis firm Montel Group, there are about two national grid substations of Heathro: in a northern hide, north of the airport, and south of the airport, in Lelaham.

It seems that only the Northern Hyde Substation is connected to Heathro through the local distribution network, the firm director Phil Hewitt said.

“This potential lack of flexibility at an important national and international infrastructure site is worrying,” he said. “An airport is larger and as important as heathrow should not be unsafe for a point of failure.”

However, Robin Potter, a research partner at Chautham House, stated that Heathro was only one of the two UK airports – Gatvic is the other – in which its flexibility is any level regulation around the standards.

“These are actually better airports in Britain how their flexibility is evaluated and regulated,” he said.

In 2023, the National Infrastructure Commission recommended the government that it should set standard for some major areas of infrastructure such as telecom, water, transport and energy by 2025.

It said with another report at the end of the previous year how the government can do for those areas.

He said, “They have been effectively on the government’s desk since October 2023.”

A heathro source said why questions would be questioned by failing to its back-up system.

Sometimes – like now – a chain is only as important as its weakest link. In case of the cost of supply of full additional power to run the airport, huge amounts of money and resources will be spent for private -owned business such as Heathro.

The question is whether the additional back-up is worth, after the additional cost passengers and cargo is delayed by the Friday disruptive, and internationally embarrassing, failure, where they are leaving.

Additional reporting by Tom Aspinner, Theo Legate, Ben King and Oliver Smith.

Update 22 March: This article has been corrected to amend the context of trade items affected by the closure of Heathro. These were millions of pounds of business items, not millions of tons as we originally said.