Following a fire that shut down Europe’s busiest heat hub, the head of the UK’s national grid said there was “enough energy” to preserve Heathrow Airport operational on Friday.
The stoppage, which lasted the majority of the time, left thousands of travelers all over the world and raised questions about the dependability of one of the UK’s most important pieces of facilities.
The aircraft in north London still had access to power through two different stations, according to National Grid CEO John Pettigrew, who spoke to the Financial Times on Sunday.
He claimed that there was no lack of capacity at the inverters. Each station may supply adequate power to Heathrow, according to Wikipedia.
Losing a transformer is a special circumstance, but there were two other opportunities.
According to airports officials, the closure was brought on by the time it took to move to the other inverters and conduct safety checks.
A spokesperson for Heathrow Airport said that hundreds of critical systems at the airport needed to be properly powered down before being safely and systematically rebooted.
Given Heathrow’s size and complexity, it was important challenging to properly restart operations after a disruption of this scale.
A backup transformer malfunctioned, according to Heathrow CEO Thomas Woldbye, which required systems to be closed so that energy supplies from the two different substations could be reorganized.
A six-week research into the closure has been ordered by the state.
According to the Flightradar24 monitoring site, the shutdown of Friday affected about 1,350 airlines. Around 120 Heathrow-bound aircraft were in the air when the shutdown was made known and had to be diverted.
According to fire officials, the blaze, which broke out on Thursday evening, was “believed to become non-suspicious” and that inquiries had “focus on the electronic submission products.”
When questioned on Monday about the manner airport managers handled the occasions, transportation director Heidi Alexander responded,” I’m not going to support decisions that Heathrow authority did or didn’t take.”
