Webinar: Beyond the blackout – Critical lessons from the North Hyde substation fire 2026

In this IIL property webinar, Jamieson Wharry-Rogers reviews the North Hyde substation fire in March 2025, the significant operational impacts on Heathrow airport and other affected businesses, and the key risk and resilience lessons emerging from the post-incident investigation.

A major power outage at Heathrow airport demonstrated how quickly operations can be disrupted when critical infrastructure is exposed to hidden vulnerabilities. In this webinar, the speaker unpacks the incident and explores what it means for organisations that depend on resilient power and utility supply. Drawing on the official investigation into the North Hyde substation failure, this session looks beyond the headline event to examine why recognised risks still resulted in large-scale disruption and how system-wide weaknesses can amplify the impact of a single failure.

This session is particularly relevant for organisations with complex operations, high business interruption exposure, or reliance on external power and utilities. Incidents like Heathrow are increasingly seen as ‘classic losses’ that organisations should use to stress-test their own resilience assumptions.

Learning objectives

• How single points of failure can exist even where redundancy appears to be in place
• Why low probability events can still drive severe business interruption
• What the Heathrow outage reveals about the importance of contingency planning, response coordination and real world testing of resilience strategies

Speaker(s)

• Chair: Helen Wade AMIChemE, IRM Cert, Group Manager Field Engineering – London Operations, FM