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.

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.

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?

Sounds so similar to a number of AK's posts over Covid - "we knew it could happen but chose to hope"

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.”

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.  

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.

A body representing 90 airlines has threatened to sue if compensation is not received.

"act of god" will be the insurers response

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.  

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.