But causing massive disruption to passengers and airlines does not necessarily have to be a consequence and should worry any professional pilot.
Neither airlines nor airport operators 'want' to cause delays. The unfortunate truth is that incidents happen. In this case the departure was from 27L and the recovery was on 27R, and quite correctly so.
Many years ago I sat behind a 767 on 27R that spat it's engine internals out onto the runway. There was a lot of expensive twisted metal on the runway that had to be collated, logged and collected. It took time.
The decision to close both runways was, IMHO, correct as no one at the time of the incident could categorically state what had caused the failure be it bird strike (carcasses and engine blades on the runway), catastrophic engine failure (as in the 767 above) or FOD ingestion during the take off roll.
Initially Operations called the closure to 12:00 local. I know, I was due to depart that morning. Once the situation was refined they brought forward the opening of 27L. I was only minimally delayed on departure and only 20 minutes late to destination.
At this point you have long haul traffic coming in from all over the globe, SH traffic feeding in to Heathrow and generally carrying minimum fuel for the ambient conditions. We don't want aircraft to be heavy over London burning extra fuel and fumes now do we.
Those pilots now have to make a decision based upon the operations closure time of 12:00 local. Many, quite rightly, diverted early. As SLF you wouldn't understand how quickly suitable diversion airfields around Heathrow become congested. Once those aircraft have diverted you need crews, pilots, ground handling resources, busses, tugs, fuel etc. etc. etc. organised BEFORE you even start applying for slots into an already over capacity airport.
Once a LH aircraft diverts it becomes a question of legal (CAA not Airline) crewing hours for what has now become a multi sector day, albeit with, potentially, a short sector. Pilots and crew need to be rotated, aircraft recovered and turned around etc.
All in all it becomes a logistical nightmare within a time and slot constrained environment.
All that considered do you really think that rash decisions were made by operational planners who run this airport every day, extremely well? As usual the operational team, ATC and the fire services covered what was a relatively benign emergency that, unfortunately, put out both runways extremely professionally and in the quickest time frame possible. This is, as always, done to reduce operational disruption in order to reduce the impact on the customer.
The incident and it's immediate consequences are purely the proverbial 'tip of the iceberg'.
Obviously all IMHO.