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Still no explanation of cause for Eurotunnel inferno three months ago
CALAIS, France: Behind sealed metal doors in a tunnel far under the sea floor, tiny pellets of concrete were flying through the air Wednesday as workers blasted the walls with wet cement.
Amid constant noise and in temperatures cooled by the blast of artificial wind, 85 engineers are working in round-the-clock shifts to repair the walls in record times.
Three months since the tunnel, which links Britain to France, was consumed in an undersea inferno, there are theories but still no explanations of the cause. Thousands of travelers were stranded and delayed on both sides of the English Channel after the blaze on Sept. 11, with traffic still disrupted along one of Europe's most vital transport routes.
While awaiting the conclusions of several parallel investigations - a police inquiry took more than a year to deliver its initial report after a fire in the tunnel 12 years ago - officials at Eurotunnel, the tunnel operator, are already drawing conclusions about how matters could be handled differently next time.
All 32 passengers and crew escaped heat of 1,000 degrees Centigrade, or 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit, in the September blaze, but 21 of the freight train's 27 carriages were destroyed, along with 650 meters, or 2,100 feet, of tunnel. Traffic is not likely to return to normal before February, when the tunnel should reopen after repairs costing €60 million, or $88 million.
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"We are not sure of the starting point, but the hypothesis is that the fire broke out 40 kilometers after entering the tunnel inside a cargo truck or in the cargo itself," Jacques Gounon, Eurotunnel's chief executive, said Wednesday during the first public visit to the tunnel since the disaster took place.
Eurotunnel said it also planned to enhance its training for staff to better handle panicking passengers, and to translate the safety instructions on board the train into nine foreign languages, rather than just English and French now.
"If you don't have good communications, panic sets in very quickly," Gounon said Wednesday. Truck drivers traveling in the cabin car smashed its windows with hammers, letting in smoke and fumes, rather than waiting a few seconds for the doors to open automatically once a special ventilation system had cleared the air outside .
"We have to manage the stress of the evacuees," Gounon said.
Also under consideration are methods to detect changes in temperature on board the moving train, and to find a fire-extinguishing system that would facilitate the firemen's work.
"My challenge is to try to prevent trucks from burning," Gounon added in an interview Wednesday amid scaffolding and forklift trucks parked on a road built over the tracks inside the tunnel. "We will strengthen measures at the entrance of the tunnel and facilitate the firemen's job of putting out the fire in the tunnel."
Eurotunnel defends its safety record on the world's longest undersea tunnel - it extends for 50 kilometers, or 31 miles. A total of 38 kilometers are under water.
"What is certain is when you have 14 million trucks passing through since the opening of the tunnel, one truck burning is unfortunately part of the statistics," Gounon said.
Eurotunnel also plans to re-examine the special ventilation system that blasts fresh air down the tunnel to clear away smoke and fumes. While it worked well this time to preserve human life, it oxygenated the flames that burned for 16 hours before firefighters could put them out.
But the company is not considering encasing the carriages in which the freight trucks travel to seal them off from any fire on logistical grounds, due to the width of the tunnel. And since it is one of the few tunnels in the world to have a parallel escape tunnel, it does not plan to revise its policy of not driving through to the other side if a fire is detected on board.
Though the damage is 50 percent more extensive than occurred after the criminally set fire in 1996, Gounon said that with better organization and machinery, the work should take about half the time.
In the first public visit to the site since the disaster, reporters could see parts of the ceiling still blackened after the fire raged through, turning walls of concrete to powder and destroying its metal supports. Paradoxically, workers sifting through the debris of the train that had been carrying machine parts, rolls of plastic and other goods found that a truckload of After-8 chocolates did not vaporize, but simply melted in the phenomenal heat.
Where once the rails stretched unhindered to England, workers have turned the tracks into an undersea road in order to bring in forklift trucks and concrete-blasting machinery, and lined it with three levels of scaffolding reaching right to the ceiling. A double metal door custom-built for the purpose seals off the tracks at the end of the work site so the engineers can work unhindered by the rush of wind from trains crossing over into the south tunnel.
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