The Daegu metro fire : a review of technical and organisational issues
Résumé
The Daegu subway fire took place in February 2003 in South Korea. The fire that embraced two six carriage trains stopped in a passenger platform, released heat at a peak rate estimated over 100 MW and tremendous amount of smoke; it is for ever recorded as one of the worst case fire that ever stoke any tunnel environment. The Daegu metro fire also reminds us that such built environments can be the theater of genuine human tragedies (nearly 200 people eventually died, many others were injured). This case study naturally deserves an in-depth analysis in order to draw all potential lessons for a better control of fire hazards in mass transit tunnels. The present paper aims at contributing to such a purpose in providing at first a consolidated report of facts and figures that characterise the course of events from information collected from a variety of sources, as identified and registered during the FIT project . In particular, the early existing information were cross-checked with more technical presentations made one year after the accident in the same city of Daegu (6th Asia Oceania Int. Conference of fire science and technology) and allow in turn some evaluation of technical and organisational aspects that played a significant role in the accident and its consequences. As in many other case studies, it was found that both technical and organisational aspects as other human factors explain by interaction the so severe overall death toll and damage paid in this accident.