Safety in underground traffic facilities: Learning from experience

On the occasion of its annual Fire Chiefs’ Forum, the International Fire Academy discussed and presented its training methods to selected industry professionals.

The topic for the 4th Fire Chiefs’ Forum, which was held in September 2015 in Engelberg, was “Co-ordination with operators and other emergency services”.

The topics of field reports were diverse: railway and road tunnels, tunnel retrofitting, new construction and construction stages.

The ifa forum is an important platform for comparing our own application engineering to experiences from real events. The very open and self-critical reports from the fire services in Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Austria provided a great opportunity to do just this.

“Co-ordination with the emergency services: Experiences as an external safety officer in accordance with RABT” was the title of the talk given by Dipl.-Ing. Frank Embert-Kreiser, Head of the Department of Tunnel Safety at KREBS+KIEFER. His conclusions from over 10 years of experience with the preparation and implementation of safety exercises:

Successful application in the field depends primarily on:
• continuous communication of all participants in the application case (tunnel authority, fire brigade, police, technical services, etc.) before the event;
• regular practising of the planned procedures in different scenarios;
• always questioning in detail the planned procedures and improvements.

This creates the prerequisites to be able to handle whatever the extent and consequences of an incident.

The forum also included a visit to the new 57-km-long railway tunnel on the Gotthardt base line a few days before the start of trial operations — a project that, due to its size, places enormous demands on all those involved in the construction phase and in future operations.