Heathrow bosses ‘warned about substation’ days earlier than main energy outage, MP committee hears

Heathrow Airport bosses had been warned of a possible substation failures lower than every week earlier than a serious energy outage closed the airport for a day, a committee of MPs has heard.

The chief government of Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee Nigel Wicking instructed MPs of the Transport Committee he raised points about resilience on 15 March after cable and wiring took out lights on a runway.

A fireplace at an electrical energy substation in west London meant the ability provide was disrupted to Europe’s largest airport for a day – inflicting journey chaos for round 200,000 passengers.

“I would really warned Heathrow of issues that we had with regard to the substations and my concern was resilience”, Mr Wicking stated.

“And it was following quite a lot of, a few incidents of, sadly, theft, of wire and cable round among the energy provide that on a type of events, took out the lights on the runway for a time frame. That clearly made me involved.”

Mr Wicking additionally stated he believed Heathrow’s Terminal 5 might have been able to obtain repatriation flights by “late morning” on the day of the closure, and that “there was alternative additionally to get flights out”.

Nonetheless, Heathrow chief government Thomas Woldbye stated protecting the airport open throughout final month’s energy outage would have been “disastrous”.

There was a threat of getting “actually tens of 1000’s of individuals stranded within the airport, the place we’ve got nowhere to place them”, Mr Woldbye stated.

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