• 2 days ago
Heathrow has returned to normal operation after a nearby fire caused the airport to shutdown on Friday.
Transcript
00:00The cause of the fire in Hayes that burned through an electrical substation remains unknown.
00:07But it is understood the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terror Unit is no longer investigating the cause of the fire.
00:16Largely because it is believed not to be of a suspicious nature.
00:22The London Fire Brigade is now leading the investigation.
00:26What we do know from previous major incidents is lessons are always learned.
00:30And we'll make sure we work closely with Heathrow Airport, National Grid, the government and other partners to make sure lessons are learned here.
00:36Well there's two messages I want to have. The first message is I think what last night's fire showed is how well coordinated the response is to major incidents like this.
00:44The fire brigade, the police, National Grid, the airport, the council and many others coming together.
00:49And I want to thank everybody who was working incredibly hard during the course of the night.
00:53The second message is my frustration in relation to the numbers of people inconvenienced by Heathrow being out of action today.
01:00I can just imagine people planning to go on honeymoon, people planning to go on a long planned holiday, people maybe going to see a loved one.
01:08Similarly people wanting to return back to the UK after a journey overseas, maybe seeing an elderly relation or a sick relation.
01:15There'll be thousands and thousands of people incredibly inconvenienced because of Heathrow being closed for all the day.
01:20Among those to comment on Friday was of course the chief executive of Heathrow Airport.
01:26First of all what I'd like to do is to apologise to the many people who have had their travel affected during the day today.
01:33We are very sorry about all the inconvenience.
01:36I would like to thank the many people who have been part of bringing the airport back into operation.
01:42That is fire services, authorities, our airlines, handlers and our own colleagues who've done enormous work to get back into operation.
01:49What happened around midnight last night was obviously that we lost a major part of our power supply.
01:56And I'd like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity, it's not a small fire.
02:02We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city.
02:07Heathrow has now returned to normal and perhaps sooner than expected.
02:12Flights actually resumed on Friday evening.
02:15And on Saturday the airport claimed it had served more than 250,000 passengers with punctual flights
02:23and almost all passengers waiting less than five minutes for security.

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