SOME flights will resume at Heathrow Airport on Friday evening after an outage caused by an electrical substation fire.
Chief executive Thomas Woldbye apologised to stranded passengers and defended the response to the “unprecedented” fire, which he said was as “as big as it gets for our airport” and that “we cannot guard ourselves 100%”.
He also said that a back-up transformer failed meaning systems had to be closed down in accordance with safety procedures so that power supplies could be restructured from two remaining substations to restore electricity enough to power what is described as a “mid-sized city”.
Meanwhile Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said there are currently no suggestion of foul play in the fire and that there would be lessons to learn from the incident.
The west London airport initially announced it would be closed until 11.59pm but later said repatriation flights for passengers diverted to other airports in Europe would resume on Friday evening.
Several airlines announced they would restart scheduled flights both to and from Heathrow, including British Airways, Air Canada and United Airlines.
Restrictions on overnight flights have also been temporarily lifted to help ease congestion, the Department of Transport said.
Heathrow is expected to run a full schedule on Saturday.
Around 200,000 passengers have been affected by the closure of what is Europe’s busiest airport.
Woldbye said: “I’d like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It’s not a small fire.
“We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.”
Asked if there is a weak point in Heathrow’s power system, he said: “You can say that but of course contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100% and this is one of them.
“This has been a major incident. I mean, short of anybody getting hurt, this is as big as it gets for our airport and we are actually coming back quite fast I would say, when you consider the amount of systems that we have to shut down then bring back up and make sure that they’re safe.”
He added: “This is unprecedented. It’s never happened before and that’s why I’m saying it has been a major incident.”
Woldbye went on to say the airport expects to return to “100% operation” on Saturday.
There were no casualties at the scene of the fire, according to the London Ambulance Service.
Footage posted to social media showed huge flames and large plumes of smoke coming from the facility.
