... but if it is true that a fire in a single substation brought the whole airport down I would say that is poor design and engineering to have such a single point of failure.
It SOUNDS like the fire was in/near the ATS, but that assume the non-technical press got nerdy parts correct. I heard one mention of 5 or 7 feeders, but they must all meet at some place.
To be fair, it's &%%^&%^ hard to not have single points of failure. You don't always control all the variables you think you do.
In the data world, a friend in the USG had to ensure there was actual redundancy on certain vital data circuits; no shard facilities, separate entrance trench to the facility, etc. To that end, an employee of his had to audit the circuits periodically. He would find that Circuit A from Carrier 24 was actually part of many 24 had leased from Carrier 32, but wait: 32 bundled those and got them from 66 as part of a huge amalgamation. (Seeing this data required pulling teeth at every stage as the carries didn't want you to know they didn't know themselves & had to search it out.) And 66's fiber was actually owned by 87. And inevitably, 87's was, for several miles, in the same trench as A*, the alternative.
So he/USG would demand a rerouting. But it was whack-a-mole, because when they got to Z & Z*, guess what.....
