Blackout at London-Heathrow: airport closed until midnight. Hundreds of flights canceled and diverted
Today's is a day of chaos at London-Heathrow Airport. The UK's main airport and the most [...]
LHR
Today's is a day of chaos at theLondon-Heathrow Airport. The UK's main airport and the busiest in Europe will remain closed for the whole day, until 11:59 p.m. (local time).
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Photo: @London Fire Brigade via X
The cause of this interruption in operations, as explained by the London Fire Brigade, was due to a fire developed in a substation of Hayes, a town in the London borough of Hillingdon that abuts LHR: the fire then caused "a major power outage", announced the company that operates the airport, hence the decision to close it for the entire day "to ensure the safety of passengers and colleagues."
FlightRadar24 returns an image of Heathrow that we have hardly seen any other time: no aircraft about to land or take off. Most of the departing aircraft were deleted, much of the incoming ones instead have been hijacked. An Emirates Airbus A380, for example, was diverted to Manchester; a Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 was diverted to Paris (CDG); even an Air Canada A330, which departed from Montreal and was bound for London-Heathrow, turned back at the Canadian airport.
Meanwhile, work continues not only to tame the flames but also to determined the causes of the fire, at the moment unknowns. The company that operates the LHR airport, for its part, "advises passengers not to go to the airport and to contact their airline" for more information.
Britain's energy minister Ed Miliband, in an interview with the BBC, called today's "an unprecedented event", and the numbers prove him right: according to Cirium, an agency that analyzes air transport data, nearly 150,000 people are affected by the closure of the British airport. Heathrow, however, predicts that the Disruptions will continue for several days: It will take time (and patience) before all operations return to normal; many speculate that it will take as long as a week.
(article being updated...)
