Wembley Park Power Outage

[chilsie]

(Un)fortunate enough to today fall victim to the power outage in the Wembley Park area that forced people to evacuate the station.
We arrived at a dark, partially illuminated platform, with the majority of lights off, though the Platform Information Screens and Way Out signs, for example, were still lit. Trains were also running, though potentially slightly affected (I noticed a Jubilee Line train start to depart, halt, and then continue out as normal). The platform indicator displayed an Uxbridge service for 3 minutes, which I was waiting for. However, as the train was pulling in, the lighting started to kick back in, though at the same time an announcement began ringing out that the station was being evacuated!
This was massively inconvenient and annoying to the passengers like me on the platform (and those still filtering in DESPITE THE EVACUATION!) that watched as our Uxbridge train which we needed to leave ran non-stop out towards Preston Road. We then had to walk to said station, which took 15 minutes, in which time Wembley Park was still shut.
Though the issue is now resolved, it is still rather farcical to me that, on a night where 83,000 people are likely going to use Wembley Park as their way of making their way home from a football match, there was seriously no better solution than to completely evacuate the station and force us onto buses or alternative means of getting home.

[Colin]

LU cannot realistically have a station open that is completely unlit , or even partiality unlit (you say the platform area was partially illuminated).

Unfortunately in this day and age its a health & safety issue; "where there's blame there's a claim" and all that. Someone only has to trip over in the dark and claims will go in, it's a sad fact.

Given that basic fact, there's absolutely no way LU can run a station with lighting issues when an event the size of 83,000 people starts tipping out. What was LU supposed to do given the unplanned nature of the power outage? I imagine LU's emergency response unit could possibly pop along and bung in some emergency lighting but that takes time to arrange.

Clearly you were inconvenienced - hence you've come on here to vent off - well sorry but safety comes above convenience!

And before anyone mentions it, it should be noted that deep level underground area's do have battery back up systems to provide some emergency lighting though these are only guaranteed for a small amount of time to enable a safe evacuation; not to keep a station open.

[Chris L]

In the distant past all way out signs had two separate supplies. One was from the National Grid and the other from internal sources.

Nowadays all way out signs have battery back ups. This is also true of some lighting.

[goldenarrow]

Unfortunately the poor comms on the ground between the events organiser and the various agencies overseeing stewarding and crowd control didn’t help matters. Despite the station re-opening after 30 mins, crowds were still being directed to Wembley Central over an hour later with predictable results.

[Colin]

There was more than one outage and initially there was low confidence in supplies holding - perhaps the decision was taken to see how stable the supply was before committing to accepting the crowds?

[goldenarrow]

Oh for sure, I don't dispute directing people away from the area was the right call. But informal channels appears to have been the way a lot people found out about this and when there was little or no contingency for crowd control at Wembley Central which was outside of the managed corden, it's understandable why people were more than a little hacked off at the lack of info/support on the ground primarily from the venue side