Swedish Research can Result in Safer Buses
2009-06-05                                                                     

About one percent of all buses each year are subject to fire incidents. The    
latest example of a tragic accident is the bus fire in the city of Chengdu, the
capital of the Sichuan province in central China, where least 25 people have   
been killed and 78 wounded according to media reports.                         

SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden has recently completed a major project
on fire safety in buses. The project has been carried out on behalf of the     
Swedish Transport Agency and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration in order
to examine the fire safety of buses and to provide recommendations for         
improvements.                                                                  

“The time span from the beginning of a fire until the bus is all in flames can 
be very short. This requires rapid evacuation of passengers or effective fire  
fighting at an early stage before it is too late,” says Dr. Bjorn Sundström,   
researcher at SP.                                                              

Most fires start in the bus's engine, but spreads quite rapidly into the       
passenger compartment. It happens within minutes and modern interior materials 
makes the fire in the passenger compartment spread very quickly.               

SP has done fire tests on full scale with a whole bus and on a small scale,    
including interior materials from the passenger compartment. The full-scale    
experiments showed that the smoke quickly filled the passenger compartment,    
followed by the entire bus being in flames.                                    

Today's requirements state that interior materials need only to pass a simple  
horizontal flame spread test. It is known to be inadequate because also        
materials with poor fire properties will be approved. The requirements for     
airplanes and trains are much stricter. SP has been engaged internationally and
has as technical experts presented a Norwegian / Swedish proposal to the UN in 
Geneva for a better testing procedure for these materials.                     

“A bus on fire in a tunnel is a catastrophic scenario. Such a fire could easily
develop into a disaster because of the rapid fire development making it        
difficult to evacuate the tunnel before temperature, smoke and toxic gases reach
lethal levels,” says Bjorn Sundström.                                          

Within the project several options to improve fire safety in buses were studied,
including how to isolate the engine from the passenger compartment and how to  
use a system for detection and automatic extinguishing. SP is now working      
together with manufacturers to introduce such improvements.                    

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For more information contact:

Bjorn Sundström, Professor, Deputy Manager, SP Fire Technology,

tel: +46 (0)10-516 50 86,  +46 705 16 50 36

or

Cecilia Nielsen
SP Corporate Communications Manager
tel: +46 (0)10-516 50 56                                   

SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden is Sweden's most comprehensive       
research institute.  With a staff of about 900, its research and development   
activities assist the competitiveness and innovation of Swedish companies, while
supporting the safety, environment and sustainable development of the wider    
society as a whole.