Flights will resume at Heathrow Airport on Friday evening as its chief executive apologised to stranded passengers and defended the response to an “unprecedented” loss of power caused by a substation fire.
Thomas Woldbye described the blaze which knocked out an electricity substation in Hayes in the early hours of Friday as “as big as it gets for our airport” and that “we cannot guard ourselves 100%”.
He also said that a back-up transformer failed and power supplies had to be restructured to restore electricity enough to power what is described as a “mid-sized city”.
Heathrow Airport CEO Thomas Woldbye apologised to passengers (PA)
PA Wire
The west London airport initially announced it would be closed until 11.59pm but later said repatriation flights and a handful of British Airways long-haul flights would resume Friday evening.
It is expected to run a full schedule on Saturday.
Around 200,000 passengers have been affected by the closure of what is Europe’s busiest airport.
Mr Woldbye said: “I’d like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It’s not a small fire.
“We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.”
Asked if there is 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% and this is one of them.
“This has been a major incident. I mean, short of anybody getting hurt, this is as big as it gets for our airport and we are actually coming back quite fast I would say, when you consider the amount of systems that we have to shut down then bring back up and make sure that they’re safe.”
He added: “This is unprecedented. It’s never happened before and that’s why I’m saying it has been a major incident.”
Mr Woldbye said the airport expects to return to “100% operation” on Saturday.
He said: “We expect to be back in full operation, so 100% operation as a normal day.
“(Passengers) should come to the airport as they normally would. There’s no reason to come earlier.”
Speaking to reporters in Swindon, Ms Alexander acknowledged the “immense distress and disruption” caused by the closure of the airport but said the incident was “totally out of Heathrow’s control”.
She said: “They have stood up their resilience plan swiftly, and they’ve collaborated closely with our emergency responders and the airline operators, they do have backup energy supplies, they have generators, diesel generators.
“None of that failed on this occasion because that backup supply is designed to protect the critical key systems within the airport and not to provide power to the whole airport.”
The Transport Secretary said she was in close contact with the Energy Secretary, the Home Secretary and with Heathrow to “make sure that any lessons we need to learn from the systems that the airport has in place are learned”.
