North Hyde report underlines urgency of ensuring resiliency of infrastructure and the workforce

A review has found that the root cause of a fire at North Hyde substation, which led to the closure of Heathrow Airport, was most likely moisture entering equipment and causing an electrical fault.

Electrical substation

The final report by National Energy System Operator adds that elevated moisture levels had been detected on the equipment in North Hyde, a transformer’s high voltage bushing, way back in July 2018.

However, NESO says, “mitigating actions appropriate to its severity were not implemented.”

Sue Ferns, Senior Deputy General Secretary of Prospect, said:

As Prospect’s submission to the NESO inquiry warned, the outage at the North Hyde sub-station resulted from a regulatory regime which prioritises short-term cost-cutting and artificially contrived competition.

Old infrastructure has not been effectively maintained and the workforce has been under-valued and under-invested in.

The consequences of this continued lack of investment are now becoming painfully clear. Urgent action is needed to ensure the resilience of our critical national infrastructure and the workforce that it depends on.

More information on NESO’s final report into the North Hyde substation outage can be found here.