London's Heathrow airport partially reopened on Friday evening after an 18-hour shutdown that crippled airline schedules across the globe.
The airport, the busiest in Europe, is expected to be fully operational on Saturday afternoon, but airlines said the closure would continue to have a “huge impact” on passengers in the coming days.
The airport authorities have been accused of “clear failure” for the shutdown on Friday due to a fire in a nearby electricity substation. About two lakh passengers were left stranded across the world as the shutdown affected over 1300 flights. Thousands of passengers are still stranded even as the operations have begun slowly.
Eight long-haul flights of British Airways finally took of Friday evening after a day of chaos and gutted journeys. However, the incident put the airport under widespread criticism for its inability to rely on backup power.
The unprecedented blaze exposes the ‘vulnerability’ in the country's infrastructure, aviation experts said.
“Firstly, how is it that critical infrastructure – of national and global importance – is totally dependent on a single power source without an alternative?” Willie Walsh, director-general of global airlines body IATA and a former head of British Airways, wondered. "It is a clear planning failure by the airport.” Walsh complained that Heathrow had once again let its fliers down.
Phil Hewitt, director of energy analysis firm Montel Group, called the situation ‘worrying’. “This potential lack of resilience at a critical national and international infrastructure site is worrying,” he said. “An airport as large and as important as Heathrow should not be vulnerable to a single point of failure.”
A fire at the North Hyde substation in west London knocked out power to the Heathrow airport for 18 hours on Friday, causing widespread cancellations and rerouting headaches, and stranding roughly 2,00,000 passengers.
Heathrow gets its electricity from three substations, each of which has a backup transformer. In case of the North Hyde substation, the backup transformer was also lost to the fire.
The blaze took firefighters around seven hours to bring under control. It affected at least 1,350 flights to and from the airport, according to flight tracking service FlightRadar 24, and the impact was expected to last several days.
(By arrangement with livemint.com)
