Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the news reports, the fire started at roughly 23:30.
UTC? ET?
Consider reading the article if you need this much detail on the topic.
London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
151–160 of 260 posts
Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
#152Is there going to be a replacement bus service for the flights?
Boston can send the duck boats
Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
#153If you haven't already, consider quitting air travel altogether.
This and quitting meat consumption (or significantly reducing either or both luxuries- I quit flying years ago, and I eat meat once a month or so as a delicous luxury) seem to be the two main ways we can reduce our individual carbon footprint, focus on which is a bit scammy by the industry heads who want to keep converting resources into money to swim in, so please also consider lobbying for stronger regulation of our collective carbon footprint.
Public luxury (libraries, health care, bike lanes, public transportation, education from birth onward that isn't about preparing obedient workers for the mill but reinforcing the benefits of mutual aid and participatory democracy), private sufficiency (I have enough. I actually have more than enough, and have spent about fifteen years getting rid of physical and digital baggage that gets in the way of good relationships, with an exponential increase in recent years, leveling out again as I scrape the barrel for more to let go of). There are so many of us on this planet- believing the lie that we can all be wealthy (in capitalist terms) will accelerate boom-bust-quit, and I don't see the Moon or Mars working out very well. We can be wealthy in social-animal terms, though, by being kind and loving and reciprocal. It's not that simple, nor will it ever not be a messy, dynamic situation, but there's a beauty to that.
Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
#154Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure a few miles away that can take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel.
Why would it be a national security issue? Military airports are working fine. National security doesn't rely on civilian airports. And communications networks aren't disrupted or anything. This isn't enabling terrorism. It's absolutely a huge economic issue. Economic-political. But I'm not seeing a national security angle here.
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Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
#155It's not the first time a major airport is down because of power failure, and other airports are working to address this type of vulnerability.
> The power vulnerability for airports was never made more obvious and painful than in Atlanta seven years ago. An underground electrical system fire in late 2017 damaged two substations and caused a complete outage lasting nearly 12 hours at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport
https://www.microgridknowledge.com/microgrids/article/551275...
Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure No. Its not. Its the fact that the decades of under-investment in power distribution infrastructure is coming home to roost. Its no secret there's little to no "fat" in the UK grid system. Hence it has difficulty coping with black-swan events such as this. Anyone who buys datacentre space in London knows the reason prices have gone through th…
> I suspect you will find its not a single point of failure either. It’s just that Hayes is a high-demand area, so see above for lack of excess capacity .... if one site goes boom, the other will struggle to take on 100% load. Hayes (North Hyde) is a few miles NE of Heathrow, but Laleham (similar sized) is only a few miles South - I’d would have assumed both served as fully redundant supplies for the airport, given i…
> (The old BBC Television Centre in London had three independent supplies, I believe)
There's a story, possibly apocryphal, that the UK nuclear deterrent submarines used the continued broadcast of Radio 4 as a dead-man switch to determine if nuclear war had broken out and they needed to open the safe containing their orders.
Which is to say: What counts as "critical national infrastructure" can be surprising.
Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
#157If you haven't already, consider quitting air travel altogether. This and quitting meat consumption (or significantly reducing either or both luxuries- I quit flying years ago, and I eat meat once a month or so as a delicous luxury) seem to be the two main ways we can reduce our individual carbon footprint, focus on which is a bit scammy by the industry heads who want to keep converting resources into money to swim i…
> If you haven't already, consider quitting air travel altogether.
Most people travel by plane because it's the only way to reach their destination in a reasonable amount of time.
Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the airline let you, why would you travel to Manchester ? That's half a day and a £100 train fare away from London. There's still Gatwick, Stansted and Luton in 'London', plus Cardiff, Birmingham and Bristol as alternatives. If money were no object even Amsterdam Schiphol or Brussels would make for a faster journey than Manchester!
Hey, clueless American here. I confess I have no idea how far apart things are in the UK. "Closer than in the US" is all I've got.
Ah, right! Here's an approximate comparison then, measuring from one of the terminus stations serving central London, according to railway timetable data:
0h 30m - Heathrow
1h 00m - Gatwick
1h 00m - Luton
1h 30m - Stansted
2h 30m - Manchester
3h 00m - Birmingham
3h 00m - Bristol
4h 00m - Cardiff
Plus Channel Tunnel trains:
2h 00m - Brussels
4h 00m - Amsterdam
Looks like I was wrong about Manchester being further than Cardiff though!!
Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
#159Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure a few miles away that can take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel.
Why would it be a national security issue? Military airports are working fine. National security doesn't rely on civilian airports. And communications networks aren't disrupted or anything. This isn't enabling terrorism. It's absolutely a huge economic issue. Economic-political. But I'm not seeing a national security angle here.
Huge economic issues threaten national security.
Economic and infrastructural sabotage isn't an unprecedented act in the last few years anyhow.
Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because it happened to catch fire Not a conspiracy theorist here, but... there's been quite a few expensive things which caught fire in Europe in the past year and change and it turned out those things didn't catch it by accident.
An example from a few days ago is how Lithuania's government believes that the Russian military intelligence was behind an arson attack on an Ikea: https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/17/lithuania-says-russian-m... There's also the "accident" that just happened to destroy a US military oil tanker. Sure enough, the captain of the ship was Russian: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/captain-arr... And it's v…
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