SAFETY IMPROVEMENTS IN THE DULLIN AND THE EPINE TUNNELS FOLLOWING FRENCH LONG TUNNELS SAFETY DIAGNOSIS

After the fire in the Mont Blanc tunnel in March 1999, the French government decided that a detailed review of tunnels longer than 1 km would be carried out in order to decrease the risk associated with accidents and/or fires in tunnels. AREA operates a network of 390 km of motorway with four tunnels. Apart from two short tunnels opened recently, the two oldest and longest tunnels were brought to scrutiny: the 1.6 km-long Dullin tunnel and the 3.2 km-long Epine tunnel located on the A43 near the city of Chambery in the Alps. The aim of this paper is to describe the actions that were carried out or are in progress in order to improve safety in these two tunnels, including emergency closure of the tunnels, automatic incident detection, better guidance to pedestrians to enable them to escape from one tunnel to the other, civil and refurbishment works, users information on the behaviour to adopt in case of fire (self rescue), and regular fire exercises. For the covering abstract see ITRD E114957.