Heathrow Airport CEO Thomas Woldbye has issued an apology to the thousands of passengers stranded as a result of the fire at an electrical substation, declaring they are “very sorry” for the disruption caused.
Europe’s busiest airport was forced to halt all services after the blaze began at the site in Hayes, West London around 11.30pm on Thursday night.
After cancelling more than 1,300 flights from entering or leaving the airport, services are set to resume from 7pm tonight, with the first 8 flights expected to be cleared for takeoff.
Speaking to the media, Woldbye stressed the “major unprecedented incident” which caused a power outage equal to that of a “mid-size city” will be resolved by tomorrow.
Heathrow Airport CEO Thomas Woldbye said he was ‘very sorry’ for the disruption caused by Heathrow’s closure
PA
Woldbye stated: “First of all, what I’d like to do is to apologise to the many people who have had their travel affected during the day. We are very sorry about all the inconvenience.
“I would like to thank the many people who have been part of bringing the airport back into operation – that is fire services authorities, our airlines handlers and our own colleagues who have done an enormous work to get back into operation.”
The CEO also made clear that full operation will be resumed “tomorrow”, urging passengers who are due to fly this weekend to make their way to the airport “as normal”.
He said: “We expect to be back in full operation tomorrow, so 100 per cent operation as a normal day. They should come to the airport as they normally would, there’s no reason to come earlier. They should be coming to the airport as they were planning to do otherwise.”
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Heathrow Airport is expected to resume some flights from 7pm tonight
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Detailing the significance of the incident, Woldbye explained that the airport has had to “restructure” power supply to their other two electrical substations, after the blaze affected one in West London.
He stated: “We lost a major part of our power supply, and I’d like to stress that this is 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.
“This is unprecedented, it’s never happened before. And that’s why I’m saying it has been a major incident. We’ve been working tirelessly to reallocate our power supply – that means closing down all our systems and then restarting all these systems in a safe way, which takes a long time.”
Noting that it was a “difficult decision” in completely shutting down operations, the CEO made clear that the safety of passengers is their “number one concern”.
Woldbye claimed that the airport will be back to normal operation ‘tomorrow’
GB News
Woldbye said: “We could see that we could not safely operate the airport, and that is our concern – number one is the safety of our passengers and our colleagues. When we realised that that is not possible with that major power loss that we have had, we had to close the airport.
“This has been a major incident – 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.
‘It’s fuelling systems, it’s bridges, it’s escalators, elevators. All of these systems have to be brought back up, tested to make sure they’re safe and put into operation.”
When pressed on the response from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Woldbye said he will be “happy to answer questions” that the Labour leader has.
He concluded: “Our procedures have worked the way they should, this takes time, and of course the Prime Minister should ask his questions and we’ll be happy to answer them.”
