161–170 of 260 posts
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It's enough explosive to cause a 2m high tsunami in the estuary, iirc. Not an option.
That is absolutely an option which other sane nations would consider. Issue a Tsunami warning and get everyone off the beach for an hour Sunday at 3am.
BBC.com has much more details and answers (ofc) https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cly24zvvwxlt
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It's enough explosive to cause a 2m high tsunami in the estuary, iirc. Not an option.
That is absolutely an option which other sane nations would consider. Issue a Tsunami warning and get everyone off the beach for an hour Sunday at 3am.
(2) Right by a river leading directly into the capital. I don't know how far away a 2m tsunami would actually go, is it close enough to the river entrance to focus it? https://www.floodmap.net to play with what "2m" would mean to the local area.
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Haven't they seen Die Hard 2?! /s Grid power is hard. Even with local generation failovers for air and ground safety systems, Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day). It's hard to route around that sort of demand. I don't disagree that this is something that shouldn't happen, but that's what we say for almost every preventable grid failure. I think this is a national inconvenience rather than a secur…
> Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day). That number doesn't seem that high, compared to a single high-speed train running at about 300kph or above. Or lets say all of the London Tube/DLR. Seems like nothing, actually.
The point I was stumbling to try and make was that Heathrow is dense. Just under a GWh a day delivered to a 1200ha site isn't going to get a natural diversity of supply, especially compared to a rail system does.
Wow. Almost all the comments argue about whether this is a national security issue.
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> 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.
Seems 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.
> 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…
Wind was the dominant source of energy in the UK last year:
https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q4-2024/wind-becomes-...
It'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…
To be fair, I'd probably be more interested to hear what major airports are doing to avoid a reoccurance of CrowdStrike-type scenarios. Which is perhaps a more likely re-occurence than loss of substation feeds.
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Taking out any power infrastructure is going to cause significant problems, no? I don't think that's a national secret in any country. I get it, all modern intelligence apparatus is draconian but this take doesn't really make sense IMO.
What a weird take. Arresting someone for reporting a major security vulnerability is pretty shitty thing for a state to do. What you're suggesting is that that's not actually that bad. Same sort of logic that leads to people getting arrested for looking at HTML and reporting that it includes passwords.
When did I ever say or imply that? I agree that intelligence agencies are draconian, but to imply that you'd be locked away (never to be heard from again) for pointing out that a substation could be bombed and cause power issues is ridiculous.