Air system risks commuters’ lives
Date
March 4, 2013
Jacob Saulwick
Transport Reporter
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Successive governments have put cost before safety, writes Jacob Saulwick.
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Wynyard Station: 010313: SMH News: 1st of March 2013: Image shows fire crews and City Rail staff attending a fire incident in a tunnell adjacent to Platform 4 at Sydney’s Wynyard Station which saw the line closed temporarily but re-opened before the afternoon peak hour. Photo by James Alcock
Emergency workers at Wynard station last week after a cable short-circuited and sent smoke into the station. Photo: James Alcock
What’s the value of a human life?
That’s the question RailCorp and its predecessors have been chewing over for more than 20 years as they have debated internally, but never told the public about, crucial infrastructure that would make Sydney’s underground train system safer.
The biggest project, and potentially one of the most rewarding, is a ventilation system to direct fresh air into the 80-year old rail tunnels.
But the cost, probably $1 billion now, has stopped governments installing what would be a largely unseen backstop for the hundreds of thousands of people who move through crowded, aged, inadequate stations every day.
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Fairfax has obtained hundreds of pages of reports and briefing notes that reveal a behind-the-scenes debate that goes to the heart of safety in Sydney’s public transport system.
The documents reveal how close the bureaucracy was to approving a ventilation system for tunnels and underground stations more than a decade ago, before official opinion turned swiftly against ventilation.
More people than ever are using the underground stations but still the O’Farrell government has no concrete plans for big upgrades to stations such as Town Hall and Wynyard, built to meet the needs of a city 80 years younger and smaller.
If ever there was a trigger to do something about safety it was the ”Blue Rattler” exercise of 1997.
On May 23, police, ambulance and rail operators ran an overnight test acting out what would happen if a bomb went off on a train between Town Hall and Wynyard.
The procedure had little publicity, though police superintendent John Laycock told The Daily Telegraph it had been a success.
”The response times by all the emergency services were good,” he said. The exercise was, in fact, a disaster.
All 40 passengers would have died in the smoke and confusion. Had it been a real train in peak hour, more than 1000 people could have perished. Rescue officers would also have died.
”During the exercise it was found that with no smoke extraction system in place that all passengers on the train would have been asphyxiated,” the report on the exercise said.
What Blue Rattler showed was that if anything serious went wrong in the underground, what was most likely to kill people was the absence of fresh air.
The ”whole of [the] tunnel relies on the movement of trains within the tunnel to provide air,” the report said. ”If no movement of trains, no air. In the event of another train(s) being halted the occupants of the train(s) would also face a serious hazard.”
In Sydney’s underground – as with most old rail tunnels – there is no in-built method to clear smoke and provide air.
Newer tunnels, such as those built for the airport and Epping to Chatswood lines, have smoke management systems, though, in a test exercise in 2001, it took the operator of the airport line’s ventilation system 20 minutes to turn it on.
But the most heavily used part of Sydney’s train system – the CBD underground – does not.
By September 1998, rail authorities had a report by consultant Stephen Grubits saying the underground presented an intolerable level of risk. On Grubits’ measure (deaths by train accidents per 100 million passenger kilometres), the risk of travelling was 0.648. The risk in the British and French rail systems was 0.026. If Sydney installed a smoke management system the risk would fall to 0.070, Grubits said.
So a smoke management system became the unstated policy, though a debate continued about whether it was better to build it through shafts providing natural ventilation or mechanical vents.
By 1999 the board of the old Rail Access Corporation had agreed to issue tenders by 2001 for a system to be built in stages: first North Sydney, then around Circular Quay, then the eastern suburbs line from Bondi Junction to Redfern, then under the city through Town Hall and Wynyard.
By early 2001, detailed costings had been prepared into what was expected to be about a $150 million system. A report, dated April 18, even named firms expected to do a large part of the work.
But within months, the project was on the heap. The Rail Infrastructure Corporation, since folded into RailCorp, had commissioned a separate report by consultants DNV to look again at the risk.
The DNV report argued the risk of a big fire or chemical release was lower than the Grubits report said. The report said the smoke management system did ”not meet the criteria for effective use of resources”.
Confronted by the opposing reports, authorities brought in international fire expert Arnold Dix to ”resolve the contrary advice”.
Dix, a lawyer and professor of engineering, interviewed all the players. His report queried the methodology DNV used. He highlighted long-standing problems in the communication systems and the ”extreme trip hazards” that would confront passengers leaving a train in an emergency.
He said train drivers and guards were not well enough prepared to take control in an emergency. And the capacity of Town Hall and Wynyard stations even then was exceeded in the afternoon peak.
But ultimately he said the money would be better spent elsewhere. The ”risk of an incident occurring, which would require a smoke management system, is currently extremely low in the Sydney underground”, said his final report, delivered in December 2001.
That was not the end of the matter. The Rail Infrastructure Corporation, State Rail and RailCorp embarked on a series of smaller safety improvements recommended in the Dix report. And, nervous about the implications of backtracking on a safety project it had previously advocated, the board of the RIC requested a peer review of DNV’s low risk assessment.
That review, completed in May 2002 by engineering consultants R2A, criticised the DNV approach, which extrapolated the chance of a tunnel fire in Sydney from overseas fire statistics ”which occurred outside tunnels and did not result in a large number of fatalities”.
The R2A report said the risk to passengers from fires was ”undesirable” but the cost of a smoke management system could not be justified.
Now Dix, the man whose report allowed the railways to avoid building the ventilation system in 2001, has changed his mind. Interviewed last week, he expressed regret for a recommendation that might have let the authorities off the hook.
”All modern railways, full stop, have got ventilation systems that allow you to control the flow of air if something was to go wrong,” he said. ”All of them. Sydney doesn’t … at the moment it doesn’t. And it should.
”These are the most important and stressed stations in Australia and Sydney as a city needs effective safe public transport. This is at the heart of delivering effective, safe public transport.”
Correction: The original version of this story said the Dix report was delivered in 2011.
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