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A war of words has broken out between Heathrow and National Grid over the fire which brought the London airport to a standstill on Friday.
The chief executive of National Grid sparked the row by claiming that Heathrow Airport had enough power from other substations despite Friday’s shutdown.
“There was no lack of capacity from the substations. Each substation individually can provide enough power to Heathrow.”
“As the National Grid’s chief executive, John Pettigrew, noted, he has never seen a transformer failure like this in his 30 years in the industry. His view confirms that this was an unprecedented incident and that it would not have been possible for Heathrow to operate uninterrupted. Hundreds of critical systems across the airport were required to be safely powered down and then safely and systematically rebooted. Given Heathrow’s size and operational complexity, safely restarting operations after a disruption of this magnitude was a significant challenge.
In line with our airline partners, our objective was to reopen as soon as safely and practically possible after the fire. The emergency services and hundreds of airport colleagues worked tirelessly throughout Friday to ensure the safe reopening of the airport. Their success meant that over the weekend, we were able to focus on operating a full schedule of over 2500 flights and serving over 400,000 passengers.
Continue reading…Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial newsA war of words has broken out between Heathrow and National Grid over the fire which brought the London airport to a standstill on Friday.The chief executive of National Grid sparked the row by claiming that Heathrow Airport had enough power from other substations despite Friday’s shutdown.“There was no lack of capacity from the substations. Each substation individually can provide enough power to Heathrow.”“As the National Grid’s chief executive, John Pettigrew, noted, he has never seen a transformer failure like this in his 30 years in the industry. His view confirms that this was an unprecedented incident and that it would not have been possible for Heathrow to operate uninterrupted. Hundreds of critical systems across the airport were required to be safely powered down and then safely and systematically rebooted. Given Heathrow’s size and operational complexity, safely restarting operations after a disruption of this magnitude was a significant challenge.In line with our airline partners, our objective was to reopen as soon as safely and practically possible after the fire. The emergency services and hundreds of airport colleagues worked tirelessly throughout Friday to ensure the safe reopening of the airport. Their success meant that over the weekend, we were able to focus on operating a full schedule of over 2500 flights and serving over 400,000 passengers. Continue reading…