Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander called the Heathrow substation fire an "unprecedented event of very significant magnitude" after it halted flights for 18 hours. She praised firefighters and staff for their response, noting backup generators kept critical systems running but couldn’t power the entire airport. The government and Heathrow have launched investigations into resilience planning and infrastructure lessons. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00This was an unprecedented event of very significant magnitude and I would like to
00:05thank the 70 firefighters who put the blaze out and the staff from National Grid in Heathrow
00:11who were able to get flights landing at Heathrow again within about 18 hours of the fire starting.
00:19I spoke to the Chief Executive of Heathrow myself on Friday morning. He explained to me
00:25at that point in time that there are multiple sources of power that feed the airport but the
00:30scale of the disruption meant there were particular problems as I understand it in terminals two and
00:35four. They had to reconfigure the power supply. There were some backup generators available,
00:41diesel electricity generators. They were designed to protect the critical systems in the airport
00:49and not to power the entire airport. Heathrow has commissioned an investigation into the way
00:56it dealt with this issue and its resilience planning. The government has also instructed
01:02NISO, which is the National Energy Systems Operator, to conduct a review of the incident
01:08itself at the substation and also to look at whether there are any wider lessons we should
01:12learn in terms of the energy resilience of our critical national infrastructure.