Heathrow Airport closed for 24 hours after electrical substation fire causes power loss for west London

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/21/heathrow-airport-closed-latest-news-fire-power-outage/

by -AJ-

19 comments

  2. >Passengers have been warned to stay away.

    How long till passengers are interviewed outside the airport complaining about their flight being cancelled?

  3. Airport closed for a whole day this is going to cause so much stress and disruption

  4. Is was to clear the gold out…….

    Something big is about to happen

  6. I can’t imagine how frustrating this must be, but I like they aren’t saying wait for updates and have just closed it all day. Pretty clear what the position is if you were unlucky enough to booked travel today.

  7. I work at Edinburgh Airport and folk have turned up for their Heathrow flights kicking off . Like mate I just put bags on a conveyor belt they don’t tell me fuck all😂 . A high viz vest is like a magnet for abuse for situations you have nothing to do with in an airport

  8. Joking apart, it is concerning that this is a single point of failure for the UKs largest airport

  9. Not wishing to stir up paranoia, but the cause of the fire should be thoroughly investigated.

  10. Single points of failure…

    No multiple feeds…

    No standby transformer or substation.

    No trailer substation available anymore due to maintenance costs.

    Yep sounds like a British tno/dno.

    The real question is what caused the fire, lack of maintenance/neglect or outside influences. Lots of our service providers are pushing basic maintenance out to its extremes so they can save costs by employing less people.

  11. • 20th of March 2025 – Substation (Heathrow)

    • 10th of March 2025 – Diesel Car Explodes in Airport tunnel (Heathrow)

    • 24th of June 2025 – Ground Stair Lift Fire (Heathrow)

    • 22nd of November 2024 – Bomb Disposal Unit deployed at Gatwick “Security Incident”.

    • 10th of October 2023 – Luton Carpark fire 1,352 vehicles destroyed

  12. Anyone think this could be Russian sabotage? Feels like the type of operations they do in clear sight and know they can’t really be called out on it because the ramifications would be so severe

  13. Awfully daring to run such a large operation without a back up

  14. My first thoughts drift towards thinking this is sabotage. I don’t have anything to substantiate this claim. A fire such as this could be caused through physical damage or a cyber attack. Highly speculative, but NATO article 5 can be triggered in the event of asymmetric attack by a hostile foreign state. That’s why this is grabbing the headlines. No one is saying it yet.

    Poor maintenance or overloading is possible. However, it’s very low odds that a transformer station bursts into flames, especially one that supports major national infrastructure. This transformer also supports several huge data centres, yet someone who works for those data centres had the forsite to equip them with back up power units. The back up power units can run for around 20 hours. This leads to the biggest issue here…

    Who the fuck decided to run Heathrow without back up power?

  15. My family were on their way back to Heathrow from the states when it happened and are now in Shannon in ireland after being redirected 

    So thought I’d keep it light by messaging ‘top a the morning to ya’ when I woke up and saw the news  

    Don’t think it was well recieved as my comedic genius was promptly ignored 

  16. I’m meant to be flying to Canada this morning from Heathrow 🙃

  17. In other news, British airways have remembered the north exist

  18. I’m in Hong Kong at the moment due to fly back to UK Monday I’m really worried the knock on effects of this will still be happening then

  19. How can Heathrow not have redundancy with multiple substations supplying power. Ridiculous.

    Every bad actor now knows you can take out Heathrow by setting fire to a single substation.

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