David Benton wrote:i know what your saying George , and it pisses me off the tv weather reports have been turned into entertainnment sessions . thank god for the met service website .
One of our problems, or the root of some of our problems, is to ignore the big systems (such as weather) we can't easily influence. Many members of the public show a rather childish insistence that things should continue to work in difficult conditions.
However, I do think that Eurotunnel and Eurostar both showed incompetence in dealing with this problem. That probably results from cost cutting - perhaps not having enough trained people or equipment ready. Possibly they need a new plan of dealing with stalled trains, using the needs of the customers in the trains as the basis. That is, perhaps they should be aware of the needs of people not to sit still for 5 hours in the semi-dark (if that is what happened).
I don't like Eurotunnel's press release absolving themselves of blame for what happened.
What I would like to have seen is for the Eurostars to have been taken to Ashford, and then the passengers transferred to Javelins. Maybe even the Javelins could have taken them from the Eurotunnel terminal. I imagine there is lots of bureaucracy involved here, but a comprehensive plan might be able to make this possible in future.
All train activity has become extremely rigid so that spontaneous reaction to problems is difficult. The two tunnel fires (total cost hundreds of millions of euros/pounds/dollars etc.) also showed lack of flexibility. In the first one there was no procedure to stop an already burning lorry shuttle from entering the tunnel. I suspect the second was the same. There doesn't seem to be an emergency red button. A stalled Eurostar inside should also have been a signal to press a red button to stop the following train from entering.
