Thousands face travel delays after tunnel inferno
A hundred firefighters were still at the site of the fire carrying out procedures to cool down the rail tunnel that links Britain to the European mainland, officials said.
The firefighters battled through the night against flames and heat that they said reached around 1,000 degrees Celsius after the blaze began on Thursday afternoon.
Almost all the 27 trucks on board a 700m-long freight train bringing them from France to Britain had burned, said Jacques Gounon, chairman of the Eurotunnel company that operates the tunnel. Tens of thousands of would-be rail travellers have been left stranded in Paris, London and Brussels and hundreds of trucks were stuck on each side of Channel.
Teams of Eurotunnel inspectors began examining the 50km of the tunnel yesterday for fire damage, the company said.
A spokeswoman said traffic could “possibly” start resuming late last night in the south tunnel, that was not damaged in the blaze, if safety inspectors delivered a green light.
Traffic was expected to resume in the least-damaged sections of the north tunnel in “one or two weeks”, a Eurotunnel spokeswoman said. “We need to redo the electricity, the concrete, everything you do when a house burns down.”
