https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2025/03/25/expect-more-of-this-2/
Having written recently about David Betz’s warning of the growing danger of political violence in the UK, I was not the only one to wonder if last week’s power outage at Heathrow airport might have been the result of some kind of terror attack. Within hours of the fire being brought under control, the anti-terrorism squad was put in charge of the investigation – which would have ordinarily been conducted by the fire authority. The problem was that past experience tells us that any terror group scoring this kind of success would have been quick to claim responsibility and to warn of further attacks if their demands weren’t met. But no such group emerged. Although, in an attempt to outdo any satirists tempted to make light of the event, the Mail helpfully speculated – “Putin ate my homework” – style – that “it woz Russia wot done it!”

Much of the speculation about terror attacks, I suspect, came from ignorance about the fire risk from electricity sub-stations. That is, to the casual observer there is apparently little in the way of a fuel to maintain such a large and prolonged fire. Thus, some external fuel would appear to be required. It was only in the days after the fire, when the media finally turned to engineers who know about these things, that we discovered that – hidden from view – electricity sub-stations contain plenty of fuel – in the form of an oil coolant – to power a large and prolonged fire… 22,000 gallons of the stuff, indeed.

Today’s confirmation that there was “nothing suspicious” about the fire, while relieving us of the concern that some new activist group has taken to attacking our critical infrastructure, forces us to draw an equally disconcerting conclusion.

The North Hyde sub-station (the one that caught fire) is used to step down the voltage from the main transmission grid from 400,000 volts to less than 132,000 volts (further local sub-stations then bring the voltage down to the 240 volts used by businesses and households in the UK). During this process (which involves passing the electricity through a high voltage coil to generate a magnetic field) a lot of waste heat is generated… hence the massive volume of coolant. So that, having ruled out external factors, the most likely cause of the fire is a classic “failure of containment” – that a failure within the transformer set fire to the coolant, resulting in a runaway fire which took hours to bring under control.

Transformers can (and do) combust regularly enough for the main causes to be well understood. Electrical surges – of the kind that follow a lightning strike – are a common cause. However, no such surge seems to have preceded the North Hayes fire. Which means that the most likely cause will have been mechanical failure. And there is good reason for believing that this will have been the cause because, as Kathryn Porter from Watt-Logic explains:

“Legacy electricity infrastructure in the UK as in most other developed nations, is reasonably old and in need of updating. This is a challenge that is coinciding with the need to build out extensive new infrastructure to connect renewable generation which is often built in areas without existing electricity infrastructure.

“According to the National Infrastructure Commission, investment in electricity networks has not kept up with demand. Its recent assessment found that over 20% of the UK’s critical infrastructure is operating beyond its intended design life.

“NGET reported in its RIIO-ET2 Business Plan Submission that it had obtained an extension of transmission transformer lives from 60 to 65 years. Typical distribution transformers in the UK are now over 60 years old, far exceeding their design lifespan.”

The common trend in British infrastructure over the last half century has been to trade resilience for profit. So, it is little surprise to find out that the electricity network operators have put paying dividends ahead of making timely upgrades to essential components within the system. And something similar seems to have been occurring at Heathrow airport itself. The electricity supplier for the area, Scottish and Southern Electricity have hit back at the airport operator’s claim that when North Hayes went offline, the supply to the airport was lost. Rather, supply was rerouted almost instantaneously through two nearby sub-stations at East Bedfont and Longford.

This has raised concerns about the airport’s investment in suitable back-up generation (which would have provided a buffer in the seconds during which the mains supply was rerouted) with online speculation suggesting that diesel and gas generation on the site had been cut below the minimum needed to avoid a shutdown of the kind that occurred last week. Certainly – and ironically – the 10MW biomass generator will not have helped as it cannot run without an external electricity supply. In any case, the airlines whose flights were diverted, cancelled or delayed are already hiring the best legal teams money can buy, and will be focussing on any cuts or maintenance failure which may have left the airport vulnerable to this kind of disruption.

The broader concern though is that this may be a system feature (albeit a highly publicised one) rather than a bug. That is, the practice of neoliberal economics at the organisational level is to put dividends and managerial salaries ahead of all else within an organisation. And this process has a particularly hard impact upon system components – like electrical transformers – which are relatively robust. That is, while an organisation has no choice but to replace fragile system components, it can get away with neglecting components whose lifespans run to several decades. Most of the UK’s nuclear reactors, for example, will reach their safe operating limit (60-years) within the next three years. However, given the UK Grid’s current inability to balance supply and demand, we will most likely follow Belgium’s and France’s example and find ways of keeping the reactors running while crossing our fingers and hoping nothing goes bang, at least until the half-built Hinkley Point C reactor comes online.

Failure need not be so dramatic, of course. The recent RAAC concrete scandal, which has forced schools, hospitals and other public buildings to close, stems from the same process of failing to maintain or replace ageing structures. RAAC used in the 1980s and 1990s was known to have a short lifespan but was mostly left until it failed before anyone acted. A similar process is developing on Britain’s roads, where decades of neglect are coming home to roost in the form of dangerous potholing resulting from no, or at best cheap, repairs being carried out where full road resurfacing is warranted… cheap repairs (mostly a man with a bucket of asphalt filling the hole) serving to make the damage worse in the long-term.

Britain’s water and sewage system is fast becoming a basket case for the same reason. The privatised water companies have a bad reputation for using borrowed money to pay salaries and dividends rather than maintain and upgrade the network to meet the needs of a growing population. With the result that rivers and beaches which had among the best water quality in the world back in the 1990s are now routinely flooded with sewage every time it rains. And, thankfully less commonly for now, even clean drinking water is no longer guaranteed as a result of compromised infrastructure.

Perhaps the biggest – and mostly overlooked – problem in years to come, however, concerns the 50-year shelf life of concrete structures. Construction carried out on the cheap – as a large amount of Britain’s was back in the 1960s and 1970s – is susceptible to the process of “spoiling” aka “concrete cancer” caused by corrosion and expansion of the reinforcing steel. Where this is visible, remedial measures can (but cost pressures may preclude it) be taken. But spoiling is most often invisible and only becomes apparent when a structure collapses. Certainly, cash-strapped Britain is in no position to carry out a replacement of the bridges, motorways and buildings constructed using reinforced concrete in the boom years of the 1960s and early-1970s… structures, that is, that are now at risk of collapse where unseen spoiling has eaten them away from the inside.

Adding to the immediate problem is that there is little political will to overhaul and upgrade existing infrastructure… politicians preferring to associate themselves with entirely new projects such as new AI datacentres and new airport runways, even though the UK lacks the materials and skilled labour to deliver even a fraction of what the politicians seem to believe can be magicked into existence. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that anyone is about to deploy what materials and skilled labour we do have to the unattractive, but increasingly urgent, process of maintaining and replacing critical infrastructure.

Continue in this way, and terror attacks on infrastructure will be the least of our worries. The ease with which a transformer fire took out Britain’s main international airport is but a harbinger of things to come. Most of the infrastructure failures will be smaller and more local – a sinkhole here, a bridge failure there – but over time, the costs will mushroom even as the impact on the economy causes further stagnation. And the longer it goes, the less able we will be to address even a fraction of the infrastructure loss.