What Caused the Eurostar Disruption?

AlArabiya English

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00:00What caused this widespread disruption? Do we have any more details on what went so wrong?

00:06Well, what we heard was that there was an incident, a power outage.

00:12And again, the question is, well, how did it happen?

00:15I am not going to be conspiratorial about this, but I mean, I do have a thing about transport in the sense that when something goes wrong,

00:23obviously, we want to know why, but you can't just settle for, oh, something went down here on the cables, whatever, and we've restored it.

00:31Yes, the engineers did come out all night and they'll put in some good claims for overtime.

00:35Let me tell you that, given the time of year as well. But there clearly was some sort of a power outage.

00:39The question is, what happened? What caused it? OK, how can we prevent it from occurring in the future?

00:45OK, now, in fairness to Eurostar, it did have a backup plan to lean into.

00:51It did lean into it and it worked up to a point. It also involved the shuttle end of things.

00:56OK, so this is this is the line which carries the cars and the trains, the freight, basically the cars and the freight.

01:02And then there was a breakdown there. So then you had a backup for those for the cars wanting to get into Calais,

01:08being stranded at Folkestone and so on and so forth.

01:09So clearly the trigger to all of this does appear to have been that power outage.

01:14Now, they will need to work out why. Why did it happen?

01:17And who's who is going to take responsibility for that?

01:21Because Eurotunnel, as I understand it, they said, hang on a minute, that's that's not our fault.

01:25But I think people get very, very sensitive when things like this happen,

01:29when you attribute it to a failure somewhere, a mechanical failure somewhere in the system.

01:34Is it just simply that there was too much capacity and it couldn't perhaps cope and it took things beyond their normal limits?

01:40Or some people might turn around and say, well, maybe there's some sort of sabotage that was going on.

01:45I'm not suggesting that for the moment.

01:47What I am saying is that when a transport system works, it works reasonably well.

01:53OK, and it copes at times when it is tested, like now the Christmas, New Year break and something goes wrong.

02:00OK, you have to think about all sorts of possibilities.

02:04OK, and you have to ask yourself, was there some malicious intent on this simply to test the system to see what damage we could inflict?

02:11Now, it's not as far fetched as it sounds because we have had episodes in other parts of Europe, for example,

02:17also in the UK where transport systems have been attacked.

02:21So you have to think about this.

02:22OK, so once upon a time when the world perhaps wasn't in the place where it is now, you could just simply take an explanation at face value.

02:30That's not quite the case.

02:32But either which way, it has certainly disrupted systems.

02:36They need to find out what happened.

02:38OK, so that it doesn't repeat itself, because we know that there are certain times in the year when the usage will be very heavy.

02:47Christmas is one.

02:47If you have long bank holiday weekends, that's another also Easter.

02:52OK, so people will want to go away.

02:54So you have to make sure this doesn't happen, because the good thing, the merciful thing is that it doesn't happen all the time.

03:01But when it does occur, it leaves a very sour taste in the mouth of the users.

03:06And they're not going to be happy because, remember, the euro style fares, they've gone up.

03:11Your average traveller who uses it, he or she is a captive audience.

03:15Why? Because there isn't a rival to it.

03:18OK, if you're going to use an alternative, you get the plane.

03:20But if you don't want to use the plane and you have to travel to Paris or to Amsterdam or to Brussels by train.

03:27OK, what rival is there to the euro style?

03:29There isn't one. Not really.

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