Fire at substation blamed for Transport for London power outage

A fire at an electrical substation is being blamed for a power outage that took out a number of Transport for London (TfL) services.

The power failure on May 12 led to disruption across seven London Undergound lines as well as the Elizabeth line and parts of the Overground network.

TfL said a short power cut at 1430 led to knock-on problems across the network. A spokesperson said that as the power stopped without warning, it was important to ensure that network was safely restarted.

Additional inspections were also required on the older Bakerloo Line before services could be safely reintroduced.

London Fire Brigade said it was called to a fire at an electrical substation in Maida Vale, where three metres of high-voltage cabling connected to the substation was “completely destroyed” by fire.

The brigade said on its incident log: “Based on current information, fire investigators believe the fire was accidental and caused by an electrical event involving high voltage cabling.”

The disruption led to the watchdog London TravelWatch saying TfL had to do “much better” in supplying information to delayed passengers, criticising the “lack of information and updates on TfL’s own social media feeds”.

“Directing all passengers to their website is not practical if the site then crashes, and people need to receive up-to-date information in order to continue their journeys with the least disruption,” a statement said.

“Passengers also need reassurance that public transport services will be more resilient in future to incidents such as this.

A National Grid spokesperson said: “We apologise for any inconvenience following a fault on our transmission network in central London. The fault was resolved within seconds and did not interrupt supply from our network, but a consequent voltage dip may have briefly affected power supplies on the low voltage distribution network in the area.

“We once again apologise for any inconvenience and ongoing travel disruption.”

It comes just weeks after a fire at a substation near Heathrow meant bosses had to close the airport due to safety concerns.

By Tom Edwards