On the night of March 20, a powerful explosion shattered the quiet at the North Hyde electricity substation near Heathrow Airport, as one of its massive supergrid transformers caught fire, disrupting the facility that supplies power to nearby homes and businesses.
According to yahoo, the blaze spread swiftly through the compound, taking out a neighbouring unit that was still in operation. Within moments, a third back-up transformer also tripped off-line.
In less than an hour, the conflagration caused cascading outages across the local network, severing power to 66,000 homes in the west London area – one of the UK’s biggest non-weather related power cuts of the past decade.
Vital cogs in the network, electrical substations shuttle electricity from power stations to the point of consumption. They vary in size, and are generally unmanned.
Yet despite being just one of three supplying Heathrow, North Hyde also cut off vital power to parts of the airport, leaving it unable to guarantee the safety of its flying operations. Europe’s busiest aviation hub was closed for more than a day, disrupting over 1,300 flights and almost 300,000 passengers, as well as costing the airlines an estimated £50-100 million in lost revenue. It was an eloquent demonstration of how a single point of failure could bring chaos to a crucial piece of the British economy. And, worse, it wasn’t the first serious electricity substation fire in March; it was the third.
Recent months have seen an epidemic of puzzling fires and failures across Britain’s electricity network, as unexplained outbreaks have erupted from Exeter in the West Country to Glasgow in Scotland. In the James Bond films, 007’s arch enemy Auric Goldfinger had a simple rule of thumb when it came to how many times seemingly innocent mishaps could recur before he perceived a more sinister pattern. “Once is happenstance; twice coincidence; three times is enemy action,” he said.
Britain’s recent experience would certainly satisfy those criteria. There have been five more blazes since the Heathrow fire, making a total of eight in about 10 weeks between the beginning of March and mid-May. “Normally you’d expect to see one or two fires every few years, not a whole bunch compressed into a couple of months,” says an electricity expert. Their frequency has even led some to speculate that the Bond baddie’s aphorism might be right and someone is indeed out to get us. While being careful to point out there is no hard evidence to support it, Philip Ingram, a former colonel in British military intelligence, has suggested the attacks look like something “straight out of the Russian military intelligence playbook”.
Yet there’s also an alternative domestic hypothesis that is no less disturbing. This argues that what we are witnessing is not the product of hostile outside action, but rather decades of shirked capital expenditure and reliance on increasingly antiquated equipment by bonus-hungry executives and financially-driven owners. In this version the enemy isn’t some foreign baddie undermining our system, it may be the stewards of the network themselves.
Growing number of fires
The epidemic of blazes started on March 3 when a small substation in West Sussex caught fire, disrupting supplies to about 400 households in the Lancing area. According to the owner, UK Power Networks, a generator installed during repairs might have been tampered with. The fire was extinguished, the police were stumped. No one thought too much more about it. Then, 11 days later on March 15 a second substation blew up in Huddersfield, west Yorkshire, leaving a worker in hospital with serious burns, and cutting off 300 customers. The owner, Northern Powergrid, promised a health and safety investigation, which is still ongoing. Five days after that came North Hyde.
Subsequent weeks saw no let up in the accidents. On March 23, fire erupted at a substation near Nottingham, cutting off power to 200 properties, and leaving the puzzled owner, National Grid, blaming “third party damage”. On April 29, it was the turn of the Aberdeen Place substation in Maida Vale, west London, to erupt in a pillar of smoke and flame when a transformer exploded. While the blaze didn’t cut off power supplies, it ignited some nearby flats, burning out four, and causing some 80 residents to be evacuated.
