The British government ordered an urgent investigation into how a fire fire at a power station at Heathrow Airport in London in the dark on Friday has led to a paralyzing of one of the busiest airports in the world.
“We are determined to understand what happened correctly and what lessons should be learned,” Britain’s Energy Minister Ed Miliband said in a late Saturday statement.
The closure of Friday has disrupted more than 1,000 flights, leaving planes and flight crews outside the position and passengers who may not reach their destinations for another few days.
Heathrow said that he will work to operate a full schedule for more than 1,300 flights on Sunday, as airlines tried to remove accumulation, which disrupted travel for tens of thousands of people. On Saturday, more than 250,000 passengers passed through the airport “with leaving on the specified date,” the airport said.
The fire, which the authorities believe that it is likely to be transverse, raises questions about the elasticity of the main infrastructure of Britain and whether the country has invested enough to preserve it.
The British government faced pressure for years to maintain the country’s transportation infrastructure, such as roads and trains. But the country faces severe financial pressure, as public services such as health care have been funded. Any demands for the main infrastructure spending that will create a political headache for the Prime Minister, Kiir Starmer, while also trying to increase military spending amid flat economic growth.
Within hours of the dark airport, engineering experts were wondering whether Heathrow was supported by the infrastructure that befits a major global center.
Martin Cobal, professor of physics at the University of Bristol, wrote in a online post that the fire was a warning sign about the country’s electrical systems.
“Unfortunately, there is no flexibility based on the national network,” wrote Mr. Cobal, a royal academy for engineering in emerging technologies, at the Scientific Information Center. “Partially, this is because we still rely on old technology in sub -stations that use copper rolls to distribute energy instead of new technology, so -called solid state transformers.”
The British authorities said they expect preliminary results from an investigation in six weeks.
In a statement, the Minister of Transport, Heidi Alexander, said that Heathrow “uses the energy of a small city, so it is necessary to determine how this power outage occurs and we learn from this to ensure that there is a vital part of the national infrastructure.”
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