London – Heathrow airport executives defended their response to a fire that Turn off the busiest air center in Europe For almost a day, after the Britain energy system operator suggested that the installation had enough electricity from other sources to continue working.
More than 1,300 flights were canceled on Friday after A fire He knocked out one of the three electrical substations that supply Heathrow energy. More than 200,000 passengers had altered trips, and industry experts say that chaos will cost the airlines tens of millions of dollars.
Airport reopened after approximately 18 hours When Heathrow had reconfigured his energy supply, something, the Secretary of Transportation, Heidi Alexander, said that “he required that hundreds of systems be seized safely and then seize safely with extensive evidence.”
Heathrow said he ran a full schedule on Saturdays and Sundays, with 400,000 passengers that passed at 2,500 weekend flights.
The great impact of fire increased concern for the resilience of the energy system of Great Britain to accidents, natural disasters or attacks. The government has ordered an investigation in “any broader lesson to learn about energy resilience for critical national infrastructure.”
The anti -terrorism police initially directed the investigation into the fire, which occurred when the authorities in Europe scored against sabotage backed by Russia. The head of the Mi6 Espionage Agency of Great Britain has accused of Moscow to set up a “amazingly reckless” sabotage campaign against the allies of Ukraine, which has been trying to repel the large -scale invasion of Russia for more than three years.
Police say they have not found “no indication of the dirty game”, and the London Fire Brigade said it is leading the investigation, which focuses on the electricity distribution team of the substation.
Gareth Bacon, transport spokesman for the opposition conservative party, said that “the malicious actors … will undoubtedly have taken note of the events of this weekend.”
“This episode underlines the urgent need to ensure that our critical infrastructure is safeguarded against accidental incidents and deliberate sabotage acts by malignant actors,” he said in the House of Commons.
Meanwhile, the public services company and airport executives are changing.
John Pettigrew, Executive Director of Energy-Spply Network National Grid, told The Financial Times that “each substation can individually provide enough power to Heathrow” so that the airport remains open.
“Losing a substation is a unique event, but there were two others available,” he said. “So that is a level of resilience.”
Heathrow said he had worked to reopen “as soon as possible and practically possible.”
“Hundreds of critical systems throughout the airport had to be off safely and then restarted and systematically,” said the airport in a statement. “Given the size and operational complexity of Heathrow, the restart safely after an interruption of this magnitude was a significant challenge.”
Heathrow’s CEO, Thomas Woldbye, also faces questions about why he put the airport operations director, Javier Echave, in charge of decision -making as the fire broke out early on Friday.
Alexander refused to support Heathrow Management decision making, saying: “I don’t have all the information they had available when they made the decision.”
“Security must always be essential, but, as I say, it was not my decision,” he told the BBC.
