The full picture is still emerging and may well have changed by the time this is published. But already, we can be sure of this much: a fire at an electrical substation in west London has shut down Heathrow, grounded more than a thousand flights, and stranded hundreds of thousands of travellers. By the time airline scheduling is considered, the disruption will last for weeks.
What we are seeing is chaos. Whilst there will have been plans and protocols in place, and the best laid of those can be tested by events, we cannot treat what we are seeing as merely an acceptable risk.
Counter-terror police have been sent to the scene, but this will almost certainly be routine protocol, not necessarily a sign of attack, said Robert Courts
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As ever, there’s lots of speculation. Counter-terror police have been sent to the scene, but this will almost certainly be routine protocol, not necessarily a sign of attack. Others have pointed to Heathrow’s push toward diesel-free, greener back-up systems. If it turned out that a switch from diesel generators to a “net zero” alternative failed when it mattered, that would be staggering – but there will be more to it than that.
But let’s put the cause to one side. It is critically important in any emergency or security situation not to speculate, not to make matters worse. To a certain extent the actual cause-doesn’t matter. What we already know, and what really does matter, is that a single point of failure has taken out Britain’s hub airport – one of the busiest in the world – for an entire day, and possibly more. This was not a military strike or a cyber-attack – we don’t yet know what it was - but it could have been. That’s the point.
Britain is riddled with critical infrastructure bottlenecks. Engineers call them single points of failure. Defence planners call them targets. If this fire doesn’t force a serious overview of our weaknesses and a strategy to resolve them, we are asking for disaster.
Heathrow’s vulnerability appears to have been laid out in the open: stand-by generators cover “airfield ground lighting”, not the full power load, which is far too demanding for that. It was known that the airport draws from the local distribution grid and not the national transmission backbone. These aren’t obscure technicalities. They’re central to the design plan.
The idea that power to Heathrow could be knocked out by a fire down the road should be unthinkable. Yet here we are, and the ramifications go far beyond Heathrow.
We need to stop talking purely about “defence” and start talking more seriously about security. This covers far more than bullets and warships, but includes the integrity of our electrical grid, our hospitals, our telecoms, and our digital systems. From NHS IT platforms to banking services, traffic lights, satellite systems and undersea cables, Britain is open to vulnerability from almost every angle. Just because we are not at war, doesn’t mean we are safe. Others take a very different view.
Ask any serious strategist and they’ll tell you: resilience is what it is all about. It means we need what engineers call redundancy: spare capacity, duplicated systems, fallback plans. Not just hoping things will work if we plan on the cheap - but planning for when they don’t. This will require an overarching strategy and government filling the gaps that business cannot.
Because the hard truth is that our adversaries - and believe you me, they are out there – understand this far better than we do. Russia has spent years probing European infrastructure. China has embedded itself in our supply chains and data flows. The West’s open systems, open society, faith in the international rules-based order and belief in “just-in-time” efficiency are a gift to any enemy wanting to disrupt and destabilise.
Heathrow’s meltdown may turn out to be nothing more than bad luck and worse planning. But it should still serve as a warning. What if next time it’s not a fire, but a coordinated cyber-attack on air traffic control? Or a telecoms blackout? Or the banking system taken offline? Or a GPS jamming incident?
We don’t need to indulge in Hollywood fantasies to see the risk. It’s already here, and quite frankly, we are unprepared for it. Simply chalking up a mild increase in defence spending – that will do little more than stave off more cuts – will do nothing to secure our own backyard and our way of life.
Events like this expose not just technical failings, but a wider political one too: the belief that “resilience” is boring, or worse, optional. It isn’t. It’s the foundation of sovereignty.
The Heathrow fire should be a turning point. Not for blame, but for building a Britain that cannot be brought to its knees by a single blaze in a substation.
