Author(s)

P. Ntzeremes, K. Kirytopoulos, I. Tatsiopoulos

Abstract

Road tunnels, as any large civil infrastructure, must be designed taking into account all hazards in order to sustain an acceptable level of safety in the course of public servicing. Therefore, road tunnel management is oriented at protecting tunnels from fires, because such events fit into the general disaster management area due to their impacts on transportation systems. After the horrendous accidents that arose in Europe at the end of the 90s, e.g. Mont Blanc, the new legislation integrated risk assessment in order to enhance the process of ensuring a minimum level of safety in all road tunnels of the trans-European network. However, the variety of risk assessment methods, each Member State adopted, does not guarantee the same level of safety in all road tunnels. This paper aims to showcase this fact through a deductive approach by implementing two assessment methods in the same tunnel fulfilling Directive 2004/54/EC’s requirements. These methods are the Greek and the French one, which beyond their common points, also bear interesting differences. Having compared the theoretical part, a fire scenario is investigated with the aid of the software Camatt 2.0. The results indicate that even a small difference in a standardized parameter of the method is capable of evaluating the same tunnel differently in regard to safety. One would expect that since the trans-European network is regarded as a common infrastructure, a common approach would also be established in risk assessment so that authorities and safety analysts of different Member States would come up with the same results. This paper contributes in raising this issue and creating momentum for the beginning of relevant initiatives.

Keywords

road tunnels, risk assessment, safety, tunnel fire, Greece, France