Random note.

I’ve been binge-watching episodes of “Seconds From Disaster“.

One thing that kind of surprises me is that there are a lot of disasters – serious disasters, causing major loss of life – that I’ve just simply never heard of until I stumbled across the relevant SFD episode. Mont Blanc Tunnel fire? Totally missed that one. Kaprun funicular disaster? How did I manage to miss that?

Interesting safety note: one of the talking heads on the Kaprun SFD episode made what I thought was a really profound point. Fire will always do the unexpected. Fire doesn’t necessarily behave in an intuitive way. 12 people survived at Kaprun because they ran downhill, towards and past the fire at the rear of the train. Which is counter-intuitive: why would you run towards the fire? Because:

The tunnel acted like a giant blast furnace, sucking oxygen in from the bottom and rapidly sent the poisonous smoke, heat and the fire itself billowing upwards.

Everybody who went uphill away from the fire died.

Also interesting: the trench effect.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2018 at 11:58 am and is filed under Safety, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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