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This page had a tag questioning whether it was sufficiently notable to have a wiki article. Someone else took this away, but it was then replaced. I have removed it again. This incident was just reported as costing tens of millions of pounds (so far), will cause disruption to hundreds of thousands of people, had directly caused a blackout for tens of thousands, has caused a bit of a scandal as to how this could actually have happened, ie how come the most important Uk airport could be closed down in this way, has dominated the UK media all day. Sandpiper (talk) 13:25, 21 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
How is this not notable? It is top of every news agenda in the UK, CNN global edition and other media. Closure of Heathrow is highly unusable. -- Firefishy (talk) 14:03, 21 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This event is a failure of national reslience. Bad planning has allowed a single point of failure to take down one of the biggest airports. Vital national engineering infrastructure is exposed as being inadequately protected. Questions are being asked. A former head of GCHQ has described this security failure as a national embarrassment. Investment in the bones of any country is neither a trivial nor a short-term matter. It is strategic. David Crayford☎18:01, 21 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I definitely think the topic of this article is notable, because it's not every day a fire at a substation shuts down one of the world's busiest airports. What we might want to consider in the long run though is whether to move the article to a different title that suggests a broader perspective. The fire in itself wasn't notable, but the effect of it was because it caused widespread disruption that was covered in worldwide media. This is Paul (talk) 18:15, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Re: Notability, i posit that this is a WP STRUCTURE issue; The Heathrow outage should have its own page, detailing all the causes and effects, a notable international event disrupting global flights for days.
The Substation fire should be one section of that, perhaps linking to a page listing other notable London electricity network failings if that is a notable enough phenomenon/category 83.136.197.14 (talk) 17:13, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Id probably agree. This page should be titled March 2024 Heathrow shutdown or similar. Some non heathrow details might be places elsewhere later, depending on the ongoing investigation. 83.136.197.14 (talk) 17:50, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Its not really clear yet what caused this fire. There are perhaps three possibilities, terrorist action such as by Russia but maybe someone else, incompetent maintenance where a serious problem went undetected, some random event which no one could have reasonably foreseen. Whichever it turns out to be will affect how the story eventually needs to be handled. Then we have the second aspect of this, which is the consequent chaos and why this was so serious. Which opens up questions of incompetent management by national grid, government security agencies, Heathrow itself. None of that information is yet clear. Its quite true that at the moment the biggest part of this event is the closure of Heathrow airport for a whole day, but its likely this will now have a similar effect to the twin towers attack, that once the vulnerability to something like this has been publicised then it becomes necessary to take steps to prevent it happening again. As such this may become a turning point in public policy all over the world. News currently discussing to what extent this may now lead to the an attempt to decentralise air traffic away from Heathrow as a critical risk, which may have long term consequences for their planned further expansion and profitability. So maybe bad news for them too as a company. This has clearly shown the risk involved in wholly relying on one huge airport.Sandpiper (talk) 09:25, 23 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I propose merging this article into Heathrow Airport, and specifically the Other incidents section where the outage is already discussed. The fire in itself is not notable per WP:EVENTCRIT; the incident's sole claim to notability stems from the airport closure, but a separate article is not needed per WP:NOPAGE. Even when the inquiry concludes, a couple of additional sentences in the airport article will probably suffice – and if the inquiry draws wider conclusions about critical infrastructure then we can always create a separate article for the inquiry itself. Rosbif73 (talk) 09:17, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No. The fire affected a substantial number of homes and businesses in west London who had no link to Heathrow. a couple of lines under accidents/incidents is more than enough on the Heathrow wikipage. Furthermore, the Heathrow wikipage is already large - it should include a link to the fire wikipage, but only for those with a special interest will need this info. The fire will be of very little interest to those reading about Heathrow in a year's time. You could compare the fire to an airplane crash - we add a link to the airport page, but keep the details of the accident on its own wikipage. Pmbma (talk) 09:43, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If anything the Heathrow page needs breaking up into more managable parts rather than expanding. The event is a subject in its own right and has specific implications for UK resilience and infrastructure. David Crayford☎10:25, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Last news item I heard asking for a rapid investigation seemed to be veering towards the biggest issue here being a failing by the electricity network operator to maintain a robust enough system. It seems to have a number of parallels to another article which already exists about a different london blackout. It strikes me there are few articles about the Uk national grid and its failings or successes. It seems more properly in a category about the electricity supply system in the UK rather than slid into an article about Heathrow. However, this might have an impact on whether or not Heathrow is now allowed to expand further, so it could become a critical influence there in the future, but I rather agree instead of being included there this should be separate. Is there a category about fires too? And what about air travel disruption generally, e.g. the icelandic volcanoes? I wholly think its cart before horse to suggest a separate article for an inquest into this, that should be a part of an article about the whole event.
Re notability, I see the policy says "Events are also very likely to be notable if they have widespread (national or international) impact and were very widely covered in diverse sources, especially if also re-analyzed afterwards (as described below)." So tick, widespread international impact. Tick widely covered in diverse sources (and diverse here seems to mean unaffiliated news media, so eg headline in every Uk newspaper, top of the news in many different countries). Remains to be seen whether this gets into published books about flight industry disasters, but there are definitely going to be official analyses published about how this happened, so already half a tick for that too. Uk government minister described it as 'catastrophic and unprecedented'. Sandpiper (talk) 11:31, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I just read a bit more of the notability guidelines, and I see it argues 'Death of Michael Jackson' is an example of a clearly immediately notable event. Which I actually find quite extraordinary when compared to something of lasting physical significance such as this. I suspect there are currently civil servants and defence experts still running around worrying about the vulnerabilities exposed by this fire. But I do find it interesting how different people will view what is obviously notable and obviously not notable very differently. Sandpiper (talk) 11:42, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My standpoint is that the fire is not a notable event in its own right. Likewise, from the point of view of local homes and businesses (other than the airport) it is just a run-of-the-mill power cut. On the other hand, the impact it had on one of the world's top five international airports is clearly notable. WP:NOPAGE tells us that at times it is better to cover a notable topic as part of a larger page about a broader topic, and I believe that this is one of those times. It is too soon to know whether the inquiry and its conclusions will be notable in their own right, but if that proves to be the case then we can consider how best to proceed at that time. Rosbif73 (talk) 15:55, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Merging this doesn’t make sense, although I'm still inclined to think the article needs a different title. As I think I've mentioned before, there are very few times Heathrow – the world’s second busiest airport – has shut completely, so an event that brings that about is notable, as is the airport closure itself. Not to mention there’ll be ongoing inquiries into why they didn’t have enough back up power, etc. I’m not sure whether a separate inquiry article would be needed, or if it could be included in this one. it would depend how in-depth the inquiry and what information emerges from it. This is Paul (talk) 17:04, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It affects almost 200,000 passenges and its a big incident in airport history to be added to the history section of the heathrow airport page. JackNick111 (talk) 09:26, 4 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
