A survey of fire accidents during the process of highway tunnel operation in China from 2010 to 2021: Characteristics and countermeasures

Abstract

China has the largest number of highway tunnels in the world and the most rapid development in this scope. Along with the advancement of highway tunnels, fire incidents continue increasing, causing significant damages to life and property safety. The knowledge of characteristics of highway tunnel fire accidents is essential for the fire authorities to update their safety policies on tunnels and also useful for the scholars to carry out basic and applicable researches. Previous studies have been performed on fire accident statistics in highway tunnels before 2016. The dataset after 2016 are unknown. To solve this problem, the present study examined total 256 fire incidents in Chinese highway tunnels during 2010–2021 based on police-reported database. The results showed that the fire number in 2017–2021 is almost three times that in 2010–2016. The fires occur more in spring and summer. The majority of fires occur in the long and extra-long tunnels (80%), in the one-way tunnels (90%), in the curved tunnels (70%), in the interior zone of tunnels (67.2%) and in the low altitude areas (60%). The top two burning vehicle types are heavy goods vehicles (HGVs, 38.1%) and passenger cars (37.2%). A total of 81.2% of fatalities in highway tunnel fires are associated with HGVs. The head of vehicle (41.8%), tire (25.3%) and goods (15.3%) are the top three causes of fire. Despite the fact that 92.7% of cases are single fire category while spread fire category only accounts for 7.3%, the spread fire has a more than 7 times higher casualty rate than the single fire. Based on the results, some useful fire safety measures for highway tunnels are proposed. It is hoped that this work could provide some data supports and references for tunnel fire safety and relative policy-making.