DR Tony Munday wrote to the Journal before Christmas regarding the proposed A303 tunnel under Stonehenge. I concur with his views.
Dr Munday referred to the lorry fire in the St Gothard Tunnel. I taught technical English for several years at the manufacturing plant for the lorry involved in the St Gothard tunnel fire, which was carrying butter – a non-hazardous, but highly calorific, load. The lorry self-ignited and the manufacturer argued that it was caused by a cigarette end igniting the paper air filter for the engine.
However, the main thing those thinking the A303 Stonehenge tunnel is a good idea should consider is the result of the lorry self igniting – a severe fire which killed a large number of people in their cars who were burnt so severely as to be unidentifiable and that the specialist Swiss fire brigade were unable to put out. The tunnel structure was so badly damaged it resulted in closure of the tunnel for a long period.
All because what would have been a minor, low-energy fire that could have easily been extinguished if the lorry had been on the open road became a major disaster because it occurred in a tunnel.
Readers may probably recall the 2011 M5 fireworks crash in which two lorries exploded on impact, causing the fires that killed seven people in cars caught in the flames.
If a similar sort of crash occurred where lorries loaded with a high calorific/energy load exploded into an enclosed inferno in an A303 Stonehenge Tunnel with nose to tail Friday afternoon second home grockle traffic, I believe we could be looking at air crash death tolls.
It is ironic that EH and their establishment friends are proposing to spend £1.6 billion on what could turn out to be a 21st century funeral pyre, for the sake of venerating prehistoric sacrificial altar stones by burying the delays of weekend second home grockle traffic in the flinty chalk of Salisbury Plain.
It is better to be 20 minutes late in this world than twenty years early in the next.
Geoff Jensen
Inventor
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