Passengers traveling from France to England on Tuesday (23) had to evacuate a train in the Eurotunnel, under the English Channel, only to be stranded for hours afterwards.
“A train has stopped running in the tunnel and we are transferring customers to a separate passenger service via the maintenance tunnel, then back to the Folkestone terminal,” Eurotunnel tweeted late Tuesday UK time. United. “Our sincere apologies for this inconvenience.”
Eurotunnel Le Shuttle operates trains that transport passenger and freight vehicles through a tunnel between England and France.
The outage affected the 3:50 pm train from Calais, France, to Folkestone, England, which was carrying hundreds of people as well as several dogs, according to PA Media news agency.
Passenger Michael Harrison told PA Media of his experience: “We took the 3pm train, and after about 10 minutes the lights went out and the train stopped. They said they needed to investigate a problem with the wheels,” he said.
“It took approximately an hour and a half for them to investigate and obviously they didn’t find anything. They restarted the trip and ran for another five minutes,” added Harrison. “Then it happened again, and we waited another two hours for them to determine that they couldn’t identify the problem, but that we had to change trains.”
Passengers then had to exit through the emergency tunnel to the maintenance tunnel, walking for about 10 minutes until they reached another train, Harrison described to PA Media.
Further problems with the replacement train meant passengers arrived in the UK six hours after boarding, he added.
The Eurotunnel Le Shuttle service normally takes 35 minutes to travel between Folkestone and Calais.
A second passenger told PA Media that “a lot of people were terrified to be in the service tunnel, which is kind of a weird place. We were stuck there for at least five hours.”
Another passenger, Kate Scott, said temperatures in the tunnel were an issue.
“It was hot, there was no air conditioning, they distributed water, but we didn’t know what was happening”, he reported.
Sarah Fellows, 37, told PA Media that “the service tunnel was terrifying.”
“It was like a disaster in a movie, as if you were walking into an abyss without knowing what was happening. We had to stand under the English Channel in that huge queue,” she described.
“There was one woman crying in the tunnel, another having a panic attack because she was traveling alone,” added Fellows. “They really expected very old people to walk more than a kilometer through an undersea tunnel.”
“At one point I panicked, and the Border Guard told us that the tunnel had been evacuated once in the last 17 years, but not recently,” he said.
The outage had repercussions on other services.
“Due to the failure of the previous train, we recommend that you do not travel to the terminal this evening,” Eurotunnel advised in a separate tweet on Tuesday. “Please come tomorrow after 6 am.”
On Wednesday morning, the company said the trains were running again. “Following yesterday’s incident, we are back to running services as normal,” he tweeted.
THE CNN contacted Eurotunnel for further comment on the incident.
The Channel Tunnel revolutionized travel between the UK and mainland Europe when it opened in May 1994, making travel much faster than the equivalent route via ferry.
The work was debated for over 180 years before British and French workers finally started digging towards each other in 1988.
It took six years for 13,000 workers to build the 50.45 kilometer long tunnel, of which 37.8 kilometers are under the sea, making it the longest of its kind in the world.
Source: CNN Brasil
