Fire safety in tunnels

In 2006 the European Parliament requested the author to conduct a study of tunnel safety and make recommendations to be considered with a view to implementation in the European Union. This had been spurred by the large number of serious tunnel fires which have occurred in Europe since 1995 and fire safety was the main concern. Following a ten-month project a report was published and made available on the web-site of the European Parliament in 2008. The full report, containing twenty five recommendations, is available and details are given in Ref. [A.N. Beard, D. Cope, Assessment of the Safety of Tunnels. Commissioned by the European Parliament via the committee on Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA); report IP/A/STOA/FWC/2005-28/SC22/29. Published in February 2008 on the European Parliament web-site at www.europarl.europa.eu]. The recommendations are intended to help to increase tunnel safety in the European Union and, primarily, to help to move towards a common system of tunnel safety decision-making and risk assessment. This article gives an outline of the report and high-lights some aspects of the content. This is not meant to imply that aspects which are not high-lighted here are of lesser importance. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.