Does anything work in Britain any more? The question has become a cliché as Brits grumble continually about creaking infrastructure. But today it seemed the doomsters were right after Heathrow Airport was forced to shut down following a fire at a nearby substation that supplies it with electricity. The fire began late on Thursday night and was only brought under control by 6:30am. The power cut caused by the blaze has since caused havoc in the United Kingdom’s largest international airport.
Terminals 2 and 4, as well as 5,000 homes in the surrounding area, were left completely without power for hours. Incoming planes were diverted to Paris and Dublin, and others were forced to turn around and return to their airport of origin. Overall, the disruption will affect more than 1,350 flights and at least 300,000 travellers.
In reality, this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg, and the knock-on effects of the chaos will be felt for weeks – if not months – to come.
The fire was caused by a transformer catching fire inside the electrical substation, according to the London Fire Brigade. Substations are a crucial part of the United Kingdom’s national electricity grid, acting as crucial nodes for the transmission and distribution of electrical energy around the country.
As a precaution, counter-terrorism police have been called in to investigate. There is no evidence yet (at the time of writing) of foul play, but the government and the Metropolitan Police are monitoring the situation closely. The Prime Minister is expected to call a COBRA meeting.
In a rare moment of relief this afternoon, the national grid was able to reconfigure its networks and reconnect Heathrow to an alternative, interim power source. And in a statement released earlier, Heathrow Airport has said that it will resume some flights this evening and return to full operations on Saturday morning. It is a remarkable turnaround.
Still, the cost to the airlines in lost revenues, and to the UK economy in lost tourism, will be significant.
Aside from causing consternation among travellers, the disruption to the UK’s largest international airport will raise serious questions about the vulnerability of the country’s key infrastructure.
Why can one small fire cause so much disorder? Why is the power needed for the UK’s most important airport reliant upon only one substation? Where was the contingency planning, and why was greater resilience not built into the system? And where does this leave the government’s recently announced plans to build a third runway at Heathrow?
One answer to these questions has been put forward by Richard Tice, the Reform UK MP. Speaking live on GB News this morning, the MP blamed net zero policies for the chaos. He alleges that successive governments, in a drive to reach emissions and green energy targets, have scrapped the national grid’s emergency diesel generators and moved to less effective biomass generators instead.
“I can exclusively reveal to you this morning”, Tice said, “that Heathrow changed its backup systems to be net zero compliant.”
Critics will point out that Tice’s claims, however plausible they may seem, are pure speculation. Indeed Javier Blas, energy guru at Bloomberg, explained that things may be more complicated:
“Heathrow draws power from two major connections to the British grid. A major substation called Hydes North, provides the bulk of its needs — and was the one that caught fire. Engineers, however, had anticipated a visit from Mr Murphy, so they designed a triple-redundancy system, with three different super transformers handling the job of lowering the voltage to 66,000 volts from 275,000 volts. One of the transformers is located far away from the two others, to add an extra layer of physical safety. Together, the power system has what engineers call an N-2 rating, which effectively means that it should be able to lose two of its components and still operate one. The problem? No one foresaw all three super transformers failing simultaneously, which is what happened on Thursday night. What looked like a system with embedded redundancy was, instead, a vulnerable single point of failure.”
More worryingly, the Heathrow shutdown has revealed to hostile powers just how fragile the UK’s national infrastructure might be to an attack. At a time of intensifying hybrid warfare across Europe, with covert actions being carried out by Russian operatives against key infrastructure, this is a serious cause for concern. The perception of weakness invites aggression, and disruption encourages emulation. If the country’s most vital international transport hub is so vulnerable, then what other parts of our national infrastructure could be also? The planners of Russian sabotage operations will no doubt be taking note.
There are also potential implications for Sir Keir Starmer’s drive to enhance Britain’s defence. Armed forces and economies are only as strong as the infrastructure that supports them. If Britain’s civilian infrastructure is so fragile, where does that leave its military counterpart?
Yesterday, in an interview with The Times, the defence secretary, John Healey, spoke of the UK’s nuclear deterrent as “the ultimate guarantor” of British security against any adversary. “We have the power to do untold damage to them if they attack us”, Healey said. Yet this deterrent – along with the entirety of the UK’s security architecture – will not be credible if the physical structures, energy systems, and digital communications surrounding it are faulty, weak and crumbling.
The difficult questions circling around today’s Heathrow shutdown will not go away.
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