Heathrow Fire Internal Report Concludes Airport ‘Responded Well’ While CEO Was Sleeping – Guido Fawkes

Heathrow Fire Internal Report Concludes Airport ‘Responded Well’ While CEO Was Sleeping

mdi-fullscreen

Heathrow airport’s internally-commissioned report into the March substation fire and subsequent shutdown is out. Authored by Blairite former transport secretary Ruth Kelly it says Heathrow “responded well”…

Key points:

• “We have concluded that the Airport responded well on the day and was able to restore full operations smoothly the following day.“
• There “may have been opportunities to open parts of the airport slightly sooner” but only by “a couple of hours or so.”
• The final NESO report has to answer the “key questions for National Grid and SSEN – particularly how this fire could begin and why all three transformers failed.” Don’t look at us…

There is a section on the “ROLE OF CEO OVERNIGHT ON 20/21 MARCH” which describes COO Javier Echave’s attempts to reach CEO Thomas Woldbye. A corker…

“14.2 F24 alarms were sent on 21 March to relevant personnel, including Mr Woldbye, at 00:21 (to activate Bronze and Silver Command and to place Gold on Standby) and at 01:52 (to activate Gold). The Chief Operating Officer, Mr Javier Echave, also attempted to call Mr Woldbye several times during the early hours of 21 March.

14.3 Although his phone was on his bedside table, Mr Woldbye reported that it did not alert him to the F24 alarms or to Mr Echave’s other calls because the phone had gone into a silent mode, without him being aware it had done so and he was asleep at the time. Records also reflect that his phone was not switched off and that the F24 calls were not answered. Mr Woldbye first became aware of the incident at approximately 06:45 on 21 March, and received a debrief from Mr Echave.”

NESO’s interim report is entirely clueless on the cause of the substation fire. 16 hours of closure, over 1,000 flights cancelled…

Read the full report below: