Decision Support for Transport of Dangerous Goods Through Road Tunnels. P. Haastrup, European Commission, Joint Research Centre Ispra, 21020 Ispra (VA), Italy
The transport of dangerous goods through road tunnels has recently received increased attention, with both OECD and EU being interested in harmonisation and regulation. The current situation is that is normally the tunnel operators, which determines under which conditions hazardous goods are transported through a given tunnel, and that has lead to a situation with many different types of regulations applied in tunnels in general, and also situations where similar tunnel, with similar transport patterns of dangerous goods are treated differently. This situation has now been recognized and progress is being made on harmonisation. The paper will depart from an analysis of the available accident data. Though the number of accidents which has happened in road tunnels are limited to less than 20 in the last 20 years, an f-N curve can never the less be constructed and compared with f-N curves from other types of accidents, and a first indication of the substances involved can be given. Based on considerations based on risk assessment in general, and on the accident analysis, a reasonable list of possible decisions (the decision space) can be constructed. Given a particular tunnel, a decision support methodology is described, which may help tunnel operators, regulatory authorities and others involved in tunnel classification to come to clear and uniform decisions concerning the transport of dangerous goods by road tunnels.