Heathrow Fire: A Question of Vulnerability and Safety

By: Mathias Seber

​Roughly two weeks ago, on March 21, 2025, a massive fire broke out at Heathrow airport, one of the largest travel hubs in Europe. The fire was sparked at a power substation in West London, 1.5 miles from the airport. It was later determined that the fire was from a faulty transformer with 150,000 volts running through it. The transformer contained 25,000 litres of cooling oil that helped fuel the fire. Over one hundred people were rushed to safety in the close proximity, and, luckily, nobody was injured. Although many rushed to extinguish it, the incident affected roughly 300,000 travelers. Along with this, the fire disrupted power to thousands of houses throughout London and affected over 1,000 flights, disrupting power to the airport for 18 hours. During the 18 hours it took officials to get Heathrow up and running, the delay demonstrated the vulnerability in the British's travel infrastructure. 

The fire begs the question, why there were not steps in place to prevent something like this from happening and if there was a greater reason behind the accident? With this question, a day after the fire, the British government launched a full-scale investigation into the disaster. This incident is not alone, however, as nearly one year ago a similar incident occurred with a ground vehicle catching on fire. The airport is said to use the same amount of energy for a small city, and many officials were deterred by having a backup energy source due to the large investment – roughly around 100 million GBP. While accidents like these occur, the airport jumped the steps of proper safety and decided not to have a proper backup solution. If Heathrow had implemented the proper precautions, planes would have had the ability to land safely. This disaster illustrates the importance of safety in a time of several aviation accidents as seen in a Korean plane crash not even a half a year ago. Going forward, governments and airlines need to be held accountable and should be deterred from cutting corners to prevent the chaos of Heathrow’s fire from occurring again.

Works Cited
Penn, Ivan. “A Fire Plunged Heathrow into Darkness. A Nearby Data Center Kept Humming. Why?” The New York Times, March 26, 2025. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025 www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/world/europe/heathrow-fire-power-outage-explained.html