The paper combines vehicle fire data, accident data and traffic data from all tunnels within the Austrian primary road network. As a result, a number of key numbers typically required for tunnel risk analyses is derived. This includes the rate of tunnel fires per vehicle kilometre and the distribution of fires intensities as well as the conditional fire probability given vehicle breakdowns or accidents and a number of other relevant results. The comprehensiveness and consistency of each of these datasets provides a unique opportunity to derive reliable key numbers on vehicle fires in tunnels. This includes the rate o f tunnel fires per vehicle kilometre as well as the conditional fire probability given vehicle breakdowns or accidents and a number of other relevant results that were presented in the paper. However, dividing a sample of 67 tunnel fires into sub-sets turned out to be delicate in a few cases where it lead to a very small number of events (e.g. number of HGV fires after accidents, number of fully-developed fires of an entire HGV with known fire brigade approach duration). Nevertheless, the ensuing results are consistent with general reasoning even in those cases. Apart from this, they, too, are based on what is one of the most complete datasets available, also from an international perspective. Thus, they can truly be called best estimates - not only in the statistical, but also in the literal sense.
How frequent are fires in tunnels - analysis from Austrian tunnel incident statistics
2014
7 Seiten, Bilder, Tabellen, 2 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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