Saturday, March 17, 2012

The shocking design of the A9 Tunnel Sierre

The video below shows the A9 tunnel where the disaster with the coach load of Belgian Children happened.

Its shows the concrete walls at the end of the 'safe' lanes. Whilst I'm not a civil engineer, I am a professional engineer in another field and frankly I think this design is shocking.

What's equally shocking is that the MSM don't seem to be making more fuss of this. Anyone who builds concrete walls perpendicular to high speed flowing traffic has made a very serious mistake.

Attempts to blame the coach driver etc frankly are no where near the whole of the story.

Everyone who has a road tunnel should be checking they haven't put in designs like this.



Remeber cars and coaches aren't designed to hit the side of mountains, but to take glancing blows or to hit other traffic that collapses and helps absorb the energy of the crash in as gradual a way as possible.

2 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Fair enough, the whole coach crash seemed a bit unusual to me, and those SOS bays have a funny layout.

BUT, do you have any reason for thinking that the coach driver hit the wall at the end of an SOS zone?

Man in a Shed said...

See the second picture here.

Also:
1) the term used by the media is hit a concrete wall. Very hard to do if your in a coach in a tunnel head on.
2) The damage to the front of the coach matches that size & shape of the lay-by end walls.