THE admission at the weekend by French and British Eurotunnel representatives that repairs to the tunnel beneath the English Channel will take at least three months - not days as originally stated - has worsened the public relations disaster started by the train fire a week ago.
"By not being completely honest and by allowing doubts and rumours to spread, Eurotunnel takes the considerable risk of frightening its future clients and disgusting its shareholders forever, an editorial in yesterday's Le Monde said.
Many of Eurotunnel's 750,000 shareholders were already threatening to sue the company before the fire. The company's shares have fallen from £14.11 in May 1989 to 87p last Friday. Many French shareholders are private individuals of modest means, some of whom have lost their savings.
Temperatures in the tunnel, it now emerges, reached nearly 1,000 degrees Centigrade during the fire, and the railway tracks melted. Shurtle cars and lorries, some of them now congealed pools of liquefied metal, are being cut into pieces and removed. The giant pre fabricated interlocking concrete pipes which make up the tunnel lining acted like an oven during the fire. Repairs will cost an estimated £200 million, and the beleaguered company is losing an additional £1 million daily from the shutdown.
The 26 lorry drivers who were evacuated from the smoke filled tunnel have retained a lawyer to press their claim for compensation for trauma as well as material damages. "These drivers feel they barely escaped death," their lawyer, Mr Gilbert Collard, said.
PA adds: An electrical engineer warned Eurotunnel bosses eight years ago that one of the safety mechanisms which failed to work in last week's fire was potentially fatal.
Mr Emerson Oetzmann, who usually specialises in aircraft safety, said he wrote to fire chiefs in 1988 raising his concerns about the plan to drive blazing trains out of the tunnel. Yesterday, Mr Oetzmann said he believed the "worst-case scenario" he painted in 1988 was exactly what happened in last week's fire and called on Eurotunnel to conduct an "urgent review" its safety policy.
Mr Oetzmann warned that the drive through policy could cause overhead power cables to short circuit and melt and the power circuit to collapse, leaving up to six trains stranded in the tunnel.
He said: "I believe that the driver of the train on Monday tried to keep going through the tunnel but the smoke caused the centenary (overhead cabling) to are and the power was cut."
He had also expressed concern about the use of open lattice work wagons on the freight shuttles.
"When I discovered they were going to use them I was apoplectic," Mr Oetzmann said. "Those wagons need to be covered. An overhead spark could set a lorry on fire, and without being boxed in, fire could easily spread."
