It seems astounding that a single fire at an electricity source shut down one of the world’s busiest airports. The disruption to the journeys of thousands of passengers and millions of tonnes of trade goods on Friday has prompted a series of questions over the resilience of the UK’s major infrastructure. The shutdown was the result of a “clear planning failure”. HEALTHROW does in fact have more than one source of electricity, but the fire that broke out damaged a “particularly important bit”. The exact cause is not yet known, but counter-terrorism police are looking into whether there was any foul play. Heathrow uses as much energy as a small city, so it is not possible for it to have the back-up power to run its operation safely by itself. A Heathrow source said it did however have back-up options for certain key systems, but kick-starting the alternative power supplies for the whole airport took time. There are two National Grid substations close to Heathrow: one at North Hyde, north of the airport, and one at Laleham, south of the airport. An airport as large and important as Heathrow should not be vulnerable to a single point of failure.
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