The Heathrow debacle
- Patrick Trancu
- Mar 23
- 1 min read
What is close to extraordinary is our ability to ignore the grey rhino. So was the critical weakness of relying on a single electrical substation to run one of the world’s busiest airports that led to Heathrow's debacle.
The Financial Times reports that Heathrow and the government were warned 10 years ago in an external report that a «key weakness" in the airport's utility infrastructure was «the main transmission line connections to the airport».
The 2014 report by consultancy Jacobs, prepared as part of an earlier expansion push, said
even a brief interruption to electricity supplies could have a long-lasting impact.
But it concluded that
Heathrow is equipped with on-site generation and appears to have resilient electricity supplies that are compliant with regulations and standards.
At the time the airport management and the British Government obviously focused on these latter few lines instead of using the findings as a springboard to ask questions, run a serious Business Impact Analysis and mitigate the risk.
This is a cautionary tale for any company. Have in place a serious business continuity plan, identify your internal and external risks and think about how to mitigate them. But most importantly look at events that affect others to ask hard questions and review your own weaknesses.
Crisis communications will be of little help once you have ignored the grey rhino. And it will not help you if the line you take is, in the words of Heathrow’s CE, that “This is unprecedented, it’s never happened before”.
Will others listen to Heathrow’s wake up call?
