Heathrow Airport was warned of the threat posed by potential substation failures days before a fire forced the airport’s shutdown last month, the head of an airline advocacy group told British lawmakers on Wednesday.
“I’d actually warned Heathrow of concerns that we had with regard to the substations,” Nigel Wicking, the chief executive of the Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee, which represents dozens of airlines that use the airport, told the parliamentary transport committee.
The fire at the Hyde North substation near Heathrow Airport late last month forced Europe’s busiest travel hub to close for nearly a full day, dashing the holiday plans of travelers and scrambling flights across the world.
Mr. Wicking said that on March 15, less than a week before the major power loss at the airport, he had raised the issue of thefts of wires and cables near an airport power supply that had briefly affected some runway lights.
In a statement after the hearing, a Heathrow spokeswoman disputed the relevance of Mr. Wicking’s comments.
“The incident Mr. Wicking referred to,” said Abbie Uzzell, “did not involve the three main incoming power supplies to the airport. This issue related to a minor substation, of which there are 250 at the airport. We were well aware of that incident before Mr. Wicking raised it.”
The substation fire that led to the power outage at Heathrow on March 21 prompted questions about Britain’s infrastructure and the lack of backup systems that could have kept the airport operational despite the interruption of power from the grid.
Mr. Wicking said he believed it took too long for officials at Heathrow to switch to other sources of power, stranding passengers at airports around Europe and causing disruptions that rippled throughout the airline industry for days.
He suggested that flights could have resumed by “late morning” on Friday if the airport had made better use of Terminal 5, the airport’s hub for British Airways, where partial power remained flowing from a separate power substation.
“Flights could have been brought in,” he said.
Thomas Woldbye, the chief executive of Heathrow, rejected that criticism.
Under intense questioning from members of Parliament, Mr. Woldbye said that airport officials had contingency plans in place for a massive power outage and that engineers had moved as quickly as possible to reroute airport systems to alternative power sources.
“We had to power down maybe 1,000 systems before we do that switch,” Mr. Woldbye said, “and then we have to switch it back on and power up 1,000 systems.”
That took at least 10 hours, he said.
He added that although some power was still flowing to Terminal 5, there was no way to keep the airport operating because key systems, including security cameras, fire control monitors, baggage handling, elevators, and scores of other systems had gone down.
“The risk of having literally tens of thousands of people stranded at the airport, where we would have nowhere to put them, we could not process them, would have been a disastrous scenario,” he told the lawmakers.
The hearing is part of the British government’s urgent inquiry into the disruption at Heathrow. Power went out just after midnight on Friday, March 21, forcing the airport to close within hours. The first plane after a partial reopening landed about 18 hours after the fire began.
Mr. Woldbye apologized to passengers who suffered disruptions and said his focus that day was on their protection.
He called the fire at the nearby substation a “very low probability event,” saying that the “situation was unprecedented.”
That answer did not appear to satisfy lawmakers, who pressed Mr. Woldbye and officials in charge of the electrical power grid about whether there should have been systems in place to prevent the airport from being plunged into darkness.
Alice Delahunty, the president of UK Electricity Transmission for the National Grid, said that an investigation was ongoing into how the fire that started in a single transformer caused the entire substation to lose power. But she said that Heathrow received enough power from two other substations to run its operation.
“I think it is a question for Heathrow as to how they access the remaining two inlets that were available throughout,” she said.
Mr. Woldbye pointed blame back at the National Grid, saying that Heathrow pays for a resilient supply of electricity from the power company and expects there to be prevention measures and backups if power goes down.
“We rely on resilience provided by our suppliers,” he said, noting that the airport is also reliant on suppliers for gasoline, water and other necessities. “We pay 135 million pounds a year for energy and the resilience setup we have with our suppliers.”
Mr. Woldbye said the airport will be conducting a review of the incident and the response, and will be talking to regulators, airlines and energy companies about how to confront similar issues in the future, even if they are rare.
