SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
London's Heathrow Airport is once again open for flights. This, after a fire at a nearby electrical substation closed Europe's busiest airport on Friday. More than 1,300 flights were canceled, leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers affected. Willem Marx reports from London.
WILLEM MARX: It all started with a fire in the nearby town of Hayes, which burned through thousands of gallons of cooling oil, sending vast flames and smoke into the night sky and frightening local residents like Savita Kapur, who spoke to the BBC.
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SAVITA KAPUR: All of a sudden, through my blinds, it looked as if it was daylight for 10 seconds. I heard a loud bang, and my living room shook. I grabbed my phone. I ran outside, and I just saw this thing on fire.
MARX: The fire knocked out power for 16,000 local residents and forced more than a hundred to evacuate, but it also knocked out power and backup power to Heathrow, which usually carries an average of 200,000 passengers a day. That was unexpected, according to Heathrow's CEO Thomas Woldbye.
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THOMAS WOLDBYE: We lost a major part of our power supply, and I like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It's not a small fire. We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city. And our backup systems have been working as they should, but then they're not sized to run the entire airport.
MARX: As a consequence, the airport could not open on Friday morning, and across the Atlantic and elsewhere, more than a hundred planes already in the air were forced to turn around or divert course.
Kim Erickson (ph) had traveled to New York to visit the Arctic Circle in Finland with a planned layover in Heathrow, but she ultimately landed in Glasgow in Scotland, where she faced further difficulties.
KIM ERICKSON: And I'm thinking, wait a minute. We just drove two and a half. We flew seven, and now we're going to drive eight. I thought I was going to lose my marbles. So I said, wait, and then they said, oh, we can't send any more vans into London. They won't allow us. And I'm like, now what?
MARX: It will take her group three days to reach their final destination, but she remains in good spirits. While for Tori Dunzello, her delay was devastating, she told the BBC, as she was heading home from New Jersey for her father's funeral.
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TORI DUNZELLO: So I'm already feeling pretty upset as it is, and then, on top of it, this has been quite traumatic. And when they - when it first happened, I burst out crying.
MARX: London's metropolitan police said their counterterrorism force was involved in investigating the fire, but there was no suspicion of foul play. Prime Minister Keir Starmer acknowledged the distress and disruption.
Power eventually returned on Friday afternoon. A spokesperson for Heathrow on Saturday morning confirmed the airport was now, quote, "open and fully operational," as airlines raced to repatriate stranded passengers around the world. Heathrow's two largest carriers, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, planned for flight schedules that are close to full. Heathrow's drafted in hundreds of additional staff to help deal with an even greater number of travelers than expected.
The fire was unprecedented, say ministers, but critics have insisted better planning could have prevented a single fire from causing such a serious outcome. In an interview with ITV News, Energy Minister Ed Miliband acknowledged that criticism.
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ED MILIBAND: Obviously, we're going to have to learn lessons about why this happened, first of all, and secondly, whether sufficient resilience was in place...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah.
MILIBAND: ...At a major institution like Heathrow.
MARX: The U.K.'s National Infrastructure Commission said Britain urgently needs national resilience standards, and that's something Parliament will now likely consider.
For NPR News, I'm Willem Marx in London. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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