Development of a Risk Assessment Method for Life Safety in Case of Fire in Rail Tunnels

The present paper describes the development of a risk assessment methodology to quantify the life safety risk for people present in a rail tunnel in the context of the creation of a fire safety design. A bow-tie structure represents the risk assessment model, starting from major contributing factors leading to disastrous events. Using past accidents for the construction of the event tree part of the bow-tie, the most important factors are determined to be: human behaviour; fire growth; ventilation conditions; safety system (e.g. Smoke & Heat Exhaust, detection, voice communication, etc.); population density. These factors are incorporated into the event tree using pathway factors. Frequencies are calculated for each branch outcome based on data from research projects, fault tree analysis and engineering judgement. For the determination of the consequences, the method makes use of three integrated models: the smoke spread, the evacuation and the consequence model. The models can take into account all types of geometry and materials, human behaviour and different susceptibilities of people for smoke. Together, they determine the possible number of fatalities, by means of an FID (Fractional Incapacitation Dose) value, in case of a fire in a rail tunnel. The final risk is presented by the expected number of fatalities, the individual risk and the societal risk. The societal risk is demonstrated by means of an FN-curve (Frequency/Number of Casualty-curve).