The cause of the fire which closed Heathrow Airport and left thousands without power in London is still unknown, according to the interim findings of the National Energy System Operator (NESO) report into the outage.
A fire at a substation on Friday, 21 March, near to the airport in West London, led to the closure of Heathrow due to a lack of power, which also resulted in thousands of cancelled flights. It wasn’t until Saturday that services were resumed.
NESO said that it would “continue and deepen our efforts” before the publication of the final report at the end of June, which will include recommendations on energy resilience and infrastructure as well as lessons for the future.
It said there were several “ongoing lines of enquiry”, including the results of National Grid Electricity Transmission’s and London Fire Brigade’s forensic analysis of the fire to identify the root cause, and the nature of its spread.
In addition, it said there would be an assessment of the implementation and legal requirements of the design standards of substation sites, the maintenance history of the North Hyde site, management co-ordination between key organisations and communications, as well as Heathrow’s network configuration and resilience.
It said that Heathrow had “no choice but to close” for around 16 hours, with the interim report illustrating a timeline of the airport getting power back, commencing around seven hours before flights resumed, before safety checks and the flow of electricity was resumed across all the terminals.
The interim findings published are an initial assessment of the evidence we have gathered so far. It added that information contained within the interim report may be refined or subject to change as the review progresses and further evidence comes to light.
Fintan Slye, Chief Executive Officer, National Energy System Operator said:
“I am very pleased to publish our interim findings from the review into the North Hyde Substation outage.
The outage led to the loss of supply to around 67,000 customers, a number of commercial customers and Heathrow Airport. It is important that the right lessons are learnt from this incident to prevent future instances where possible and to manage them effectively when they do occur.
NESO’s unique position in the energy sector makes it well placed to provide recommendations to improve the resilience of the country’s energy system, and the resilience of its critical national infrastructure.
I want to thank the organisations who have provided evidence to the review for their cooperation. We will continue to work with the key stakeholders as we move towards publishing the final report.”
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