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I find it so hard to believe one of the world's major airports does not have a UPS. I wonder if their computer systems are protected from power failures and surges. In the early 50s General Motors in Detroit USA lost a complete factory to a fire that not only stopped vehicle production but also affected their parts supplies to major customers. The fire was seen to be the world's largest fire at the time. After that their Fire Protection was the best anywhere in the world at the time. I worked for Delco Electronics in Kirkby, one of the general Motors plants in the UK, and I was amazed to find four Electric sub Stations inside the factory walls. They were designed to "kick in" immediately if the electrical power failed. Each one was protected by a CO2 system and a wet pipe sprinkler system as back up. That factory was built more than 65 years ago and despite a few fires breaking out they were all well confined by the volunteer fire brigade, I was Chief Fire Officer. I know the Heathrow Airport power outage and fire was well away from the airport and their own Fire Brigade would not be involved but they relied on a single sub station for power. I was really amazed to see Heathrow so badly affected by a fire in their only power supply sub station.
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They did have back up to power an emergency shut down of the airport - it didn't just go black. UPS is a temporary supply to protect safety functions to permit a controlled shut down. The only "Uninteruptable" is these through flow devices provide output power when the feed supply stops.
During the current digital voice debacle BT sent a UPS for powering my domestic broadband. This breeze block sized device would power the router for up to four hours with the run time decrasing as more devices were plugged in - just imagine the size of a battery back up plant to keep Heathrow fully functional whilst power is re-routed. The government has announced a resilience review which is also doomed. I worked for a chemical plant where part of our resilience was to have two sub-station feeds one from either side of the plant. One day our ususal feed was off-line for sub-station maintenance, no problem said the Process Engineers until a gang of utilities sub-contractors made a line strike during an unannounced excavation.
That day our Hazard Operability team became fervent believers in Murphy's law.
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They did have back up to power an emergency shut down of the airport - it didn't just go black. UPS is a temporary supply to protect safety functions to permit a controlled shut down. The only "Uninteruptable" is these through flow devices provide output power when the feed supply stops.
During the current digital voice debacle BT sent a UPS for powering my domestic broadband. This breeze block sized device would power the router for up to four hours with the run time decrasing as more devices were plugged in - just imagine the size of a battery back up plant to keep Heathrow fully functional whilst power is re-routed. The government has announced a resilience review which is also doomed. I worked for a chemical plant where part of our resilience was to have two sub-station feeds one from either side of the plant. One day our ususal feed was off-line for sub-station maintenance, no problem said the Process Engineers until a gang of utilities sub-contractors made a line strike during an unannounced excavation.
That day our Hazard Operability team became fervent believers in Murphy's law.
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firesafety Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I think we should be careful not to jump to conclusions, but it seems fairly clear that Heathrow was not reliant on one single substation as the back up supply started to kick in within a few hours. Need to give an investigation time to consider how adequate the resilience was for a very improbable event. Whether the investigation is sufficiently thorough, comes up with appropriate recommendations and whehter these are put into effect in a timely manner, we can't prejudge. However, we DON'T have e.g. a parallel West Coast Mainline to be available should the WCML be out. So people make judgements based on probability and consequence and there is a limit to how many huge, ugly substations one wants in a built up environment or even in the counrryside where such a facility would take up green space. When the water supply to my locality went off last year, due to a burst 36 inch pipe about 8 miles away, I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly the contingency plan was put into effect and mains supply restored.
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Business Continuity is a bit like home insurance. Nobody likes to pay for it and when money is tight, often it's the first thing to go and be replaced by a crossed fingers policy hoping that nothing goes wrong.
But before the Govt gets too demanding re the Heathrow cock up, they need to take a long hard look at the resilence of their own critical infrastructure.
They need to look at sites where halon was decommisioned and never replaced with an alternative suppression system as a senior career Civil Servant with no fire safety competence announced "we will live with the risk" before promptly retiring (true story)
They need to look at how many Govt data centres do not conform to BS 6266:2011 (Fire protection for electronic equipment installations. Code of practice) as many do not (true story)
And they need to look at their own practice of lining up emergency generators next to each other - often only separated by fuel tanks - to save money. (yep, another true story). Not great as a fire in one generator will take out all of them
Now lets look a SSE (Scottish and Southern Electricity) and Heathrow - these are the two companies involved with this outage fiasco. I dare say they will be under similar financial pressures as the Govt Estae, but they also need to satisfy their shareholders with a bit fat premium
I wonder - like the water industries - critical UK infrastructure such as SSE and Heathrow should ever have been privatised and now obliged to turn a profit which may have effected management decision making on expensive projects
Why for instance, didnt the cooling oil temperature warning devices on the transformers flag up a problem so intervention could be made before the explosion? (assuming that overheated oil was a part cause of the failure)
The truth will come out, but when?
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Sounds so similar to a number of AK's posts over Covid - "we knew it could happen but chose to hope"
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Sounds so similar to a number of AK's posts over Covid - "we knew it could happen but chose to hope"
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Well the latest story from various media outlets seems to be: - A substation that supplies power to Heathrow caught fire and was out of action
- The other two substations that supply power to Heathrow continued to run normally and according to the electricity company( National Grid?) that should have been enough to keep the airport going.
- The airport has is own limited generating capacity based on a biomass plant( is it any use or just something to make them look “green”)
- There are backup generators and UPS system they are only able to support critical services such as landing lights etc. That is they have enough power to enable the airport to safely receive airplanes but not enough to operate the coffee machines.
- The issue according to Heathrow management is now described as one of them having to power down and reset various systems at the airport. Not clear why that took 18 hours.
There has been a significant amount of finger pointing with airlines seemingly not convinced by Heathrow’s explanation for the shutdown and the power company (not sure which one) insisting that there was enough juice going into the airport to keep it mostly running. Perhaps they could have kept the airport going but would have been forced to shut down all of the shops, bars etc. that would have impacted the airports cash flow and it might have been cheaper(not necessarily safer) to simply shut the airport. We will see what comes out over the next few days. Whether we get a true picture, I think will be unlikely. The finger pointing will stop and they will go back to making money. At least nobody was hurt.
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Quoting Nigel Farage this morning. He said on X: “Heathrow Airport had no diesel generator backup. It was removed as part of their drive to net zero. Dubai Airport and many military bases do have diesel generators and their aircraft would have continued flying. The truth about this disaster is being withheld.”
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Ok under the Civil Contingencies Act Heathrow airport would be classed as a Category 2 responder as it is “An airport operator, within the meaning of section 82(1) of the Airports Act 1986 (c. 31), in Great Britain.” As such it would have a legal duty to plan for an emergency which definitions includes “ disruption of facilities for transport,”( Section 1,(2),(g) of the Act). I would suggest that if the airport has done what Nigel Farage has claimed then it would be in very deep doo doo for not fulfilling its duties under the Act. Let’s see what happens?
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firesafety - can I suggest that Nigel Farage might not know what he is talking about and just wanted a soundbite in preference to allowing an investigation to progress and then comment on the findings, good or bad. In response to Nigel's tweet or whatever it is called these days on X, somone has commented: What a lying [REDACTED!!!]. No diesel generator can run all the systems and keep the lights on for an airport the size of Heathrow.
Anotber person comments: Not sure what Nigel wants here. In 2024, Heathrow handled 83.9 million passengers, and as a result the airport consumes as much electricity per day as a small city.
They have backup power sources purely to land any aircraft that are already too close to divert and to evacuate the premises if needed. Building a diesel generator ‘farm’ big enough to run the whole airport would probably lead to the demolition of Slough, and operating it would probably need a direct pipeline from Kuwait.
A little exaggeration in that, perhaps, though it does highlight the subject of quite how much land might be needed for diesel generators as a back up power supply. May be time to bulldoze my first primary school not far from Slough? Dubai Airport also says that it has LOTS of solar panels and is putting in more as part of its drive for Sustainbaility. Plenty of articles about that which are MUCH more likely to have credibility than something that NF has to say about all things Net Zero. As for military airports they don't tend to have many fare paying passengers. So an entirely false comparator.
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not a fan of nigel and his ilk then?
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Morning AK Now, if these Forums included emojis within the menu I would probably have put a smiley face here, even though I very rarely use emojis! I could, of course, have gone and got such an emoji from elsewhere, but whether it would properly cut and paste into a Forum posting, who knows? (though given the formatting issues I have had with these Forums I suspect that the answer would be not) I try to avoid party politics on these Forums, so what I think of Farage is largely irrelevant. I do have a fairly close relative who is one of Nige's constituents. I imagine that they may not be entirely impressed with the service they are getting out of their local MP.
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I have just read that a business can sue for defamation! That could be interesting…
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A body representing 90 airlines has threatened to sue if compensation is not received.
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"act of god" will be the insurers response
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"act of god" will be the insurers response
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I worked in a Govt business continuity team for around 15 years. It was a small team with a huge remit and - like Heathrow - if we got it wrong - there would be questions in the House and senior heads may roll.
Ironically, we sent a couple of staff to Heathrow to look at their set up and to see if we could learn from them
One key thing we did was to make BC plans for all areas of the operation and then exercise and regularly. It was not popular, especially with individual managers. They would be forced to stand up, make decisons in front of peers - sometimes videoed - and then explain their rationale for the decisons they had made
There was a very laid back 'no blame' open atmosphere encouraged, but it was amusing when a cocky egotisical senior manager fell flat on his or her face in front of a crowd
Sadly, the same senior managers were always missing from the training and this showed when they had to sit on or manage the crisis management team. They were totally out of their depth and were carried by lower grade staff like me
From this experience and knowing what I do about crisis management (& Heathrow), I wonder if someone in the Heathrow crisis team just got it wrong and didnt have the technical knowledge of their emergency plans. It a huge guess I must admit.
I was once asked whether a critical Govt building should be shut and evacuated during a hazmat incident and it was one of the most difficult operation decisions I had ever made. I had 42 years experience in the fire service and civil service by then and although I was confident to delay the evac, I was nervous
If I was a career manager with little emergency experience and another 15 years of my career left to do, I may well have closed this building down to be on the safe side and to protect my career
The truth will come out I am sure, especially now the power companies are effectively blaming Heathrow. I believe Heathrow bosses at being questioned this week - maybe tomorrow- in Parliament. That could be fun!!
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One of the problems with the Civil Contingencies Act is that is places statutory duties on both public sector bodies like councils, the police central government and private sector bodies like the companies that run our airports. If a public sector body gets it wrong( or is perceived as getting it wrong) you get the whole parliamentary questions and reviews finger pointing exercise. Private sector bodies simply ask if it’s going to lose them money and affect the share price. It also explains why Heathrow may have decided to close the airport not because they could not handle the planes but would have had to shut the shops etc which would have cost them money. Note that is just a theory so please don’t sue me! Hopefully Heathrow airport management will have an opportunity to explain in detail why they shut the airport.
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The Civil Contingencies Act 2004, was there a Predecessor ? Early 90s while working for Delco Electronics Overseas Organisation, a General Motors company, I was sent down to London for a one day Disaster Recovery Planning course. It was all very interesting and all made sense to me. Emergency power was part of the Plan. Gereral Motors in USA were full of emergency planning including the emergency power supply. As far as I know the Civil Contingencies Act didn't exist but I do know it was sensible to plan for large scale emergencies. I organised a full scale Operation Cloudburst (Chemical leak) with Kodak in Kirkby and we practiced that one Sunday morning alongside the factory employees. I had ten pumps Emergency Tender and Control Unit in attendance. That was a massive attendance for a Tactical exercise, so taken seriously by all concerned.
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The Civil Defence Act 1948 but that was mainly related to dealing with the outbreak of nuclear war. Large scale chemical leaks are dealt with under COMAH and earlier legislation derived from the Seveso directive.
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