LEILA FADEL, HOST:
London's Heathrow Airport will stay closed all day after a fire in London caused a power outage. Heathrow is Europe's busiest airport, so the closure will affect more than 1,000 flights today. And as Willem Marx reports, the disruption will stretch into the weekend.
WILLEM MARX: Several dozen firefighters have battled the substation blaze in the nearby town of Hayes, with more than 16,000 homes without power and more than a hundred people evacuated. But the global impact of Heathrow's shutdown will affect hundreds of thousands more people, with dozens of international airlines forced to reconfigure their schedules to avoid Heathrow, which serves as a global hub for British Airways and several of its partners. London's Metropolitan Police have said there's no indication of foul play so far, but its counterterrorism command is now involved in the investigation. Passenger Will Hastings in New York told the BBC that he and others had been waiting four hours for their bags to be offloaded from their canceled flight. And he'll return home via Germany, but not for another two days.
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WILL HASTINGS: I've been rebooked to go to Munich on Saturday, so they've pushed me - right? - two days. And I won't get back to the U.K. until Sunday afternoon now. Other people are going via various wonderful places. And it's crazy such a piece of critical national infrastructure's been impacted by one fire.
MARX: More than a hundred other flights were forced to divert or even turn around while in midair, including one from Delhi that was carrying British passenger Lucy Adler, who also spoke to the BBC this morning.
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LUCY ADLER: Captain woke us all up and said, hey, there's been a fire at Heathrow. And we all thought he was going to say, land at a different airport. It was a bit of a shock to the system to hear we were, like, flying a whole nine hours to end up back where we started.
MARX: A spokesperson for Heathrow has warned of, quote, "significant disruption" in the days ahead and told passengers to avoid traveling to the airport, quote, "under any circumstances." Britain's energy minister, Ed Miliband, said this morning the outage makes Heathrow look vulnerable and that lessons must be learned about how this was possible.
For NPR News, I'm Willem Marx in London.
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