Methane concerns and protection in tunneling: a new approach from the recent tunnels through the Northern Apennine (Italy)
The historical railway tunnels built in the late (ⅩⅨ) century and early (ⅩⅩ) century in the Northern Apennines suffered during executions for methane inflow with explosion and fires that lasted up to six months. That also resulted into many injuries and casualties cases. In the 1990s, in prevision of the execution of many long tunnels for the new high-speed railway and highway across the Northern Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, the Emilia Romagna and Tuscany Regional Safety Boards (RSB), with the scientific support by the Universities of Bologna and Florence, decided to address this topic with a new approach aligned to the new executions methods (Mechanized, D&B and TBM) and the new EC directives on safety. This new approach has the philosophy to look for the methane in the terranes and manage its possible inflow into the tunnel. On the base of the geological features, historical data and preliminary investigations the RSB developed a classification with five classes for methane hazard (MHC): 0) none, 1a) hypothetical, 1b) potential, 1c) possible, 2) sure. For each MHC the classification defines the type of equipment and plants to be used during tunnelling, the in situ investigations to be executed at the face and the safety measures and procedures to be followed. All these measures imply an increase of the building costs; this increase of costs results distributed on the entire project. According to this approach, the RSB required to clients for the preventive classification of each tunnel into stretches of different MHC. On turn, builders were committed to provide for the correct execution works according to the prescriptions of the classification. As built of more than 100 km of tunnels, no casualties or injuries resulted for methane hazards, nor any accident or delay of time in the execution, and no further increase of costs. At present, this approach is largely used for ensuring the safety from methane hazard in tunneling in Italy.
M. Coli P. Berry F. Calzolari A. Matteucci A. Muller
Department of Earth Science, Florence University, Italy Department of Chemical, Mining and Environmental Engineering, Bologna University, Italy, Italy ASL Bologna, Italy ASL 10 Firenze, Italy
国际会议
西安
英文
261-273
2016-05-25（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）