The recent closure of Heathrow Airport due to a fire at the North Hyde substation has exposed critical gaps in fire safety planning and crisis resilience. As Europe’s busiest airport, and the second busiest airport in the world, Heathrow suffered an estimated cost of up to £26 million loss in a single day, raising serious concerns about crisis preparedness in key UK infrastructure.
The fire, believed to have been caused by a failure in a transformer, led to extensive damage. Key safety measures appear to have failed, including the transformer’s fire protection system, a water deluge system, and electrical safeguards designed to contain such incidents. The absence of a blast wall between transformers likely further exacerbated the damage, resulting in a more widespread power failure.
Why Was There no Contingency Plan?
A fundamental question remains: why wasn’t there an effective contingency plan to restore critical operations within a short timeframe? Power failures unfortunately happen, however major infrastructure sites should have power failover strategies that enable them to bring essential systems online within a short time period, ensuring continuity and minimising disruption to operations and the wider public. The Heathrow incident demonstrates that such planning was either inadequate or absent. High-impact, low-probability events like this cannot always be prevented, but their consequences can often be mitigated with proper planning.
Response from Heathrow Airport
Heathrow CEO Thomas Woldbye acknowledged the severity of the incident, stating that the fire resulted in a power loss equivalent to that of a mid-sized city. While he defended the airport's response, he admitted that backup systems were not designed to sustain full operations. This raises further concerns about whether large-scale infrastructure sites are adequately prepared for worst-case scenarios. Proper fire safety, power redundancy, and crisis management plans are essential to prevent similar disruptions from happening in the future.
What do Other Major Airports do?
Many major international airports have implemented robust crisis planning and backup power strategies to prevent large-scale outages. For example, JFK Airport in New York operates a 110 MW gas-fired CHP plant, enabling full microgrid functionality during outages. Frankfurt Airport has redundant grid feeds, on-site gas turbine generation, and UPS systems to maintain continuous power. Similarly, Amsterdam Schiphol has an integrated energy management system with diesel and battery backups to keep essential systems running. These measures ensure operational resilience and highlight the importance of investing in infrastructure capable of handling emergency situations.
Lessons for the Future
This incident underscores the urgent need for enhanced fire safety measures and resilient infrastructure planning. Key takeaways should include:
- Stronger Fire Protection Systems: Ensuring fire suppression systems function effectively to prevent catastrophic damage. Understanding why the water deluge system did not function as it was supposed to will be key, was the system regularly checked and maintained?
- Improved Electrical Safeguards: Faster fault detection and backup protection to minimise failures.
- Comprehensive Contingency Planning: Developing clear strategies for emergency power restoration and crisis response.
What Can the Wider Business community Learn from the closure?
The Heathrow incident serves as a warning to all businesses. Organisations should assess their own resilience plans, ensuring they have backup systems in place, fire protection measures, and rapid recovery strategies in place. Regular risk assessments, staff training, and scenario-based crisis planning can make all the difference in maintaining operations during unexpected disruptions.
The Heathrow incident is a stark reminder of why proactive fire safety and wider crisis planning is essential, not just in airports but across all critical infrastructure sectors.
