UK: power outage paralyses Heathrow
London's Heathrow Airport - the busiest in Europe - was brought to a standstill for the whole of Friday due to a power outage caused by a fire at a nearby electricity substation. Around 1,300 flights and 200,000 passengers were affected by the shutdown. British commentators draw different conclusions after the blackout.
Make infrastructure more resilient
The fact that the failure of a single system could bring the entire airport to a halt sends a shrill wake-up call, The Daily Telegraph notes:
“We need to stop obsessing about climate change, which we can only do so much about, and instead focus on making our infrastructure more resilient. This should apply not only to weather but also to human error, extreme political groups or nation states that want to attack us. Single points of failure should not be tolerated and for Heathrow boss Thomas Woldbye to admit that back-up plans were neither adequate nor working should be reasons for resignations, not explanations.”
Symbol of Britain's decline
The blackout at Heathrow shows once again what a bad state Britain is in, laments The Sun:
“We can now add the appalling global humiliation at Heathrow to Britain's terrifying dossier of decline. Our economy is on its knees, last summer's G7-leading growth wiped out, our debt soaring far beyond forecasts, public services collapsing and even our roads crumbling beneath our wheels, apparently never to be fixed. ... Does Labour fully grasp how rapidly we are returning to an era of bleak national failure, of the sort we thought we left behind forever in the 1970s?”