More than 2,000 passengers spent Friday night trapped in the Channel Tunnel, some without anything to eat or drink, in stuffy conditions with no power. There were reports that at one point they were advised to "breathe shallowly".
I am not an engineer, but I was a former IT consultant and one of the major parts of any projection was a hell on earth known as "system test." During system test, one of our jobs was to dream up the scenarios of failure and how one would recover the system from such, to include detailed written procedures, which might address manual collection of date, evacuation of personnel, "telephone trees," etc.
It would occur to me that when one embarks on a project to transport thousands of people beneath the English Channel, a system test would address "total electrical failure" as well as "emergency evacuation."
"Breathe shallowly?" Holy cow!
I can swim. I'll take the ferry. I think my chances on top of the water are better than below it.
When Timmy falls in the well in America, all resources are organized to save him. The governor calls out the National Guard, geologists devise the best way of drilling a parallel well to reach him, paramedics are lowered at a risk to themselves, etc. Clearly, however, if Timmy had the same misfortune befall him in, say, Antwerp, he's toast . . .
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