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Desolation Heathrow

BAA, which runs Heathrow, has admitted it turned down an offer by the British Army to help shovel away the snow and ice on its runways.  Instead, it went it alone, and has cancelled thousands of holiday flights, spoiling Christmas for tens of thousands of people.  It also only invested half a million pounds this year in cold weather removal gear, but boasted of profits of over 350 million.  Heathrow should be ashamed.  The truth is, British companies offload the suffering onto the British people, when bad weather strikes, shrugging their shoulders and blaming an act of God or aberrant weather, when in fact the fault is in their own balance sheets - the weather is perfectly ordinary at Christmas (we had snow last year too) and such snowstorms, in American, Canadian, or Russian, cities, would be shrugged off, as minor, easily de-iced and cleared away.  This is incompetence with a human cost.
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Urban Kisses said…
British Companies are not always limiting their suffering to the British people - the chaos at Heathrow has had a knock on affect across the globe.

As an expat, I often have family to visit at Christmas - not this year sadly as we know from past experience that bad weather and bad company policy can truly throw a spanner in the works.

B.
Tue Dec 21, 08:47:00 pm 2010
Poetry Pleases! said…
Dear Todd

Tell me about it! My sister is stuck in New York and can't get home (at least she has George Osborne and Andrew Neil for company!) and my step-daughter who is flying in from Turkey can't get her flight confirmed. Merry Christmas everybody!

Best wishes from Simon
Wed Dec 22, 11:03:00 am 2010
Silkworms Ink said…
As someone who has had their Christmas ruined by the snow/airport clog up, I couldn't agree more Todd!

-Phil
Wed Dec 22, 06:12:00 pm 2010
Anonymous said…
Brutish Airways Authority is in fact a Spanish company. Not that it makes an iota of difference to their incompetence, just that the appalling Brits need to be castigated for losing control rather than for simply exercising it badly.
Fri Dec 24, 10:00:00 pm 2010
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