Power Outage at Heathrow Airport - Realiability and Resilience
- Thread starter Joao
- Start date
"
Firefighters are seen tackling the blaze at the electricity substation on Friday
A statement from the Met Police read: 'The Met's Counter Terrorism Command has been working with partners to establish the cause of the fire at the electricity sub-station in Hayes last week (21 March).
'Following enquiries to date, officers have found no evidence to suggest that the incident was suspicious in nature.
'As such, we are no longer treating this as a potentially criminal matter, although we continue to support other partners, including colleagues from National Grid, London Fire Brigade and SSEN, with whom we remain in close contact.
'Should any relevant new information or evidence come to light it will be looked at and considered as appropriate.'"
But I don't know.
hillbilly1
Senior Member
- Location
- North Georgia mountains
- Occupation
- Owner/electrical contractor
Something similar happened at Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport years ago, but not as severe.
ron
Senior Member
- Location
- New York, 40.7514,-73.9925
Walls between transformers and redundancy is 20/20 hindsight. Plenty of times there are power transformers without a wall between them throughout the world, and redundancy is a cost item that is easy to want after the fact.
petersonra
Senior Member
- Location
- Northern illinois
- Occupation
- Semi-retired engineer
We will never know with certainty what happened.
If they state unequivocally it was not terrorism there is at least a 1 in 3 chance it was. They can't very well admit it.
Or it could be bad design and/or defective parts. Or just bad luck.
If they state unequivocally it was not terrorism there is at least a 1 in 3 chance it was. They can't very well admit it.
Or it could be bad design and/or defective parts. Or just bad luck.
But the entire Heathrow was shot down for many hours.................
My apologies........
shut down..........
Elect117
Senior Member
- Location
- California
- Occupation
- Engineer E.E. P.E.
Id be more interested in knowing their routine maintenance and inspection results. Mainly on the insulation testing and gas/liquid testing.
Most of the time it is nothing nefarious but instead decay or lack of maintenance. All things fail given enough time.
Most of the time it is nothing nefarious but instead decay or lack of maintenance. All things fail given enough time.
I agree - most of the time it is not. And failures do happen from to time. But this is not just a failure - it was a major disaster. A total shut shut down of one of the #largest airports in the world.
Elect117
Senior Member
- Location
- California
- Occupation
- Engineer E.E. P.E.
The shut down is a result of a design flaw. Fully redudant transformer adjacent with no blast wall. That means if the transformer fails catastrophically it will take out the one next to it.
That transformer, yes. But the entire airport was shut down for two days !
Elect117
Senior Member
- Location
- California
- Occupation
- Engineer E.E. P.E.
That is the design flaw. The transformers being that close with no wall meant that all the terminations, wire, protection equipment, etc. needed to be tested and repaired before they could energize the redundant transformer or even install a spare. All of it was damaged by the single transformer's failure.
If it were me, I would probably due a single breaker - single bus at different ends of the airport and use a 33kv or 16kv intertie PMH system to pad mounted transformers or have a intertie feeder to each sub with an additional breaker.
I'm sure that there is more to this. Look at this:
"A fire near Heathrow Airport has caused commuter chaos as train services suffer significant delays early this morning.
National Rail has announced that disruption is expected until midday.
The operator announced on its website: "A fire next to the track between Heathrow Terminals and London Paddington means trains running between these stations may be delayed by up to 30 minutes"
For Heathrow it was 2 days. I'm sure there was more to it than that.
Yes but airport are feeding by 3 substations. So redundancy were available. I saw some comments about 11 kV ring that is not available downstream.
Lets wait for preliminary report.
Only final report could indicate it.
ron
Senior Member
- Location
- New York, 40.7514,-73.9925
Design flaw? Those are big words to use against a system that was working great for a long time.
Maybe an installation failure? Also a big statement that isn't appropriate.
More than likely multiple things could have been done different if there were no limit to schedule, cost and schedule.
Elect117
Senior Member
- Location
- California
- Occupation
- Engineer E.E. P.E.
I dope they do.............
ron
Senior Member
- Location
- New York, 40.7514,-73.9925
The airport operations may be considered critical now that there was a failure, but I've worked on loads of critical projects that during design and construction the schedule and cost make the criticality questionable from the owner / operator's standpoint.