Heathrow bosses were warned of potential substation failures just days before the airport was forced to close for a day after a fire sparked a major power outage, MPs have been told.
Nigel Wicking, the chief executive of Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee, told MPs of the Transport Committee said there were a ‘couple of incidents’ which made him concerned – including the lights on a runway being taken out.
On March 21, Heathrow was plunged into chaos after a devastating electrical fire forced the UK’s busiest airport to close for the day.
Some 270,000 passengers’ journeys were disrupted after the airport’s main electrical substation exploded and set alight less than two miles away in the west London suburb of Hayes.
Heathrow is supplied by three substations, but knocking out one caused a huge power outage at the airport.
Mr Wicking told the Transport Select Committee he spoke to the Team Heathrow director on March 15 about his concerns, and the chief operating officer and chief customer officer on March 19.
He said: ‘I’d actually warned Heathrow of concerns that we had with regard to the substations and my concern was resilience.’
Mr Wicking, head of the body representing more than 90 airlines using Heathrow, explained: ‘It was following a couple of incidents of, unfortunately, theft of wire and cable around some of the power supply that, on one of those occasions, took out the lights on the runway for a period of time.
Nigel Wicking (pictured), the chief executive of Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee, told MPs of the Transport Committee said there were a ‘couple of incidents’ which made him concerned
Heathrow bosses were warned of potential substation failures just days before the airport was forced to close for a day due to a major power outage, MPs have been told. Pictured: The fire at Hayes electrical substation
The smouldering North Hyde electrical substation which caused a power outage at Heathrow
On March 21, Heathrow was plunged into chaos after a devastating electrical fire forced the UK’s busiest airport to close for the day
‘That obviously made me concerned and, as such, I raised the point I wanted to understand better the overall resilience of the airport.’
Mr Wicking said he believed Heathrow’s Terminal 5 could have been ready to receive repatriation flights by ‘late morning’ on the day of the closure, and that ‘there was opportunity also to get flights out’.
But Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye said keeping the airport open during the outage would have been ‘disastrous’.
He told the committee: ‘It became quite clear we could not operate the airport safely quite early in this process, and that is why we closed the airport.
‘If we had not done that, we would have had thousands of passengers stranded at the airport at high risk to personal injury, gridlocked roads around the airport, because don’t forget 65,000 houses and other institutions were powered down.
‘Traffic lights didn’t work, just to give you an example, many things didn’t work. Parts of the civil infrastructure didn’t work.
‘So the risk of having literally tens of thousands of people stranded at the airport, where we have would have nowhere to put them, we could not process them, would have been a disastrous scenario.’
Asked by the Transport Select Committee if the estimated 10 hours it would take to re-power Heathrow sounded resilient, Mr Woldbye said: ‘I think under an event like this one, which is as unlikely as has been described, that is the resilience that is in place. That is the playbook that is in place.’
Mr Woldbye told the committee there was ‘not endless, seamless switch-over for everything in the airport’ and that bosses were ‘still at a stage where we don’t know why it happened’.
Mr Wicking said: ‘Ten hours for me were too long, and actually the time it took to make the decision to go into the 10-hour process seemed too long.’
