While Heathrow airport said he was now “completely operational”, thousands of passengers remained trapped, and the airlines warned that severe interruption will last days while they rush to relocate airplanes and crews and take travelers to their destinations.
The bothering passengers, angry airlines and worried politicians want answers about how a seemingly accidental fire could close the busiest air center in Europe.
“This is a great shame for Heathrow airport. It is a great shame for the country that a fire in an electricity substation can have such a devastating effect,” said Toby Harris, a politician of the Labor Party who runs the National Preparation Commission, a group that campaigns to improve resilience.
The Secretary of Energy, Ed Miliband, said he had asked the National Energy System operator, to supervise the gas and electricity networks of the United Kingdom, that “urgently investigates” the fire, “to understand any broader lesson that is learned about energy resilience for critical national infrastructure.”
The initial findings are expected to report within six weeks.
“The government is determined to do everything possible to avoid a repetition of what happened in Heathrow,” said Miliband.
Heathrow announced his own review, led by former Secretary of Transportation Ruth Kelly, a member of the Airport Board.
Heathrow president Paul Deighton said Kelly will analyze “the robustness and execution of Heathrow crisis management plans, the airport’s response during the incident and how the airport was recovered.”
More than 1300 flights were canceled and about 200,000 people stranded on Friday after a nightfire to a substation 3.2 kilometers away from cut to Heathrow and more than 60,000 properties.
Heathrow said on Saturday that he had “added flights to today to facilitate the 10,000 additional passengers.”
British Airways, Heathrow’s largest airline, said he expected to operate around 85 percent of his 600 flights scheduled at the airport on Saturday.
The princess puts money behind the bar for the celebrations of the Day of St. Patricio
While many passengers managed to resume stagnant trips, others remained in limbo.
Laura Fritschie of Kansas City was on vacation with her family in Ireland when she knew her father had died. On Saturday he was stranded in Heathrow after his flight from Ba to Chicago was canceled at the last minute.
“I’m very frustrated,” he said. “These were my first big vacation with my children since my husband died, and now this. So I just want to go home.”
The closure points to a broader problem
The residents in western London described listening to a great explosion and then seeing a ball of fire and clouds of smoke when the fire crossed the substation.
The fire was controlled after seven hours, but the airport was closed for almost 18 hours.
A handful of flights took off and landed on Friday night.
Police said they do not consider the suspicious fire, and the London Fire Brigade said their investigation would focus on the electricity distribution equipment.
Even so, the great impact of the fire left the authorities facing questions about the crunchy infrastructure of Great Britain, much of which has been privatized since the 1980s.
The Labor Left Government has promised to improve the plagued railways of the United Kingdom delay, its aged water system and its energy network, promising to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy independence through investment in the wind and other renewable energy sources.
“The last 40, 50 years we have tried to make services more efficient,” said Harris.
“We have eliminated redundancy, we have simplified processes.
“We have advanced towards a kind of economy ‘just in time’. There is an element in which you must ensure that it is available for ‘just in case’. You have to plan that things go wrong.”
Heathrow is one of the most busy airports in the world for international trips, and saw 83.9 million passengers last year.
The executive president, Thomas Woldbye, said he was “proud” of the way in which the airport staff and the airline had responded.
“The airport did not close for days. We closed for hours,” he told the BBC.
Woldbye said that Heathrow’s support supply source, designed for emergencies, worked as expected, but was not enough to manage the entire airport, which uses as much energy as a small city.
“This is how most airports operate,” said Woldbye, who insisted that “the same would happen in other airports” faced with a similar fire.
But Willie Walsh, who directs the IATA Aviation Trade Organization, said the episode “raises some serious questions.”
“How is that critical infrastructure, of national and global importance, depends totally on a single energy source without an alternative? If that is the case, as it seems, then it is a clear planning failure by the airport,” he said.
Walsh said that “Heathrow has very few incentives to improve” because airlines, not the airport, have to pay the cost of caring for interrupted passengers.
Friday’s interruption was one of the most serious since the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallakull volcano in Iceland, which closed Europe airspace for days.
The passengers on about 120 flights were in the air when Friday’s closure was announced and found landing in different cities and even different countries.
Mark Doherty and his wife were halfway to the Atlantic when the map on board showed his flight from the John F. Kennedy airport in New York to Heathrow returned to New York.
“He was like, you’re joking,” said Doherty.
He called the situation “Typical England: I do not have an support plan for something that happens. There is no contingency plan.”
