‘Significant disruption [is expected] over coming days,’ London mayor Sadiq Khan said as he thanked emergency services for responding to the fire at a substation.
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The London fire brigade was called shortly after 11pm on Thursday to a fire at an electrical substation in Hayes, west London, with power cut to thousands of homes as well as Europe’s busiest airport.
The closure of Heathrow, Britain’s biggest airport and one of the busiest in the world, is expected to immediately affect more than 1,350 flights to and from the airport on Friday.
Passengers were warned that flights could be disrupted for several days as the airport waited for power to be restored, after what the government ministers said was an “unusual and unprecedented incident”.
While Heathrow has experienced significant disruption from external events such as the air traffic control outage in August 2023 and the mass groundings during the Covid crisis, the last time the airport was fully closed for an extended period was during heavy snowfall and freezing conditions in December 2010, when 4,000 flights were cancelled.
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