How much chaos can an instance of deferred maintenance cause? The UK's National Grid is finding out. A fire that shut down London's Heathrow Airport for more than 16 hours in March has been traced to a transformer fault first flagged by the local power provider seven years earlier, according to a new report. The National Energy System Operator's review found that National Grid, which handles the area's power, detected moisture in a transformer component as far back as 2018. The BBC reports such a reading indicates "an imminent fault and that the bushing [an insulating material] should be replaced," per the report.
But no repair occurred; further, regular maintenance on the transformer that should have occurred in 2022 was deferred, reports the New York Times. "Evidence provided to the review revealed that multiple attempts were made to schedule basic maintenance, none of which went ahead," the 77-page report found. In response, National Grid says it's reviewing protocols and reassessing the resilience of substations serving key infrastructure. Britain's energy regulator, Ofgem, has launched its own inquiry and plans an audit of National Grid to evaluate whether there's a wider maintenance issue at play.
Heathrow itself doesn't emerge unscathed in the National Energy System Operator's report, which found the airport hadn't adequately planned for the possibility that its main power supply would fail because it "was not assessed to be a likely scenario"; as such, Heathrow wasn't able to rapidly switch to power from two alternate substations. Following the release of the report, the BBC reports that Heathrow indicated it might sue the National Grid.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
