Damn thats scary
Whats with Japan and major tunnel collapses?
A major road tunnel has collapsed in Japan, trapping a number of vehicles and leaving at least seven people missing, media reports say.
Survivors described how large sections of concrete fell on top of cars in the Sasago tunnel.
A fire broke out and rescuers said a number of charred bodies had been seen.
The incident started at 08:00 local time (23:00 GMT Saturday), about 80km (50 miles) west of Tokyo on a road that links it to the city of Nagoya.
The tunnel is one of the longest in Japan.
'Frightened'
Pictures from closed circuit TV cameras inside the tunnel showed a section of up to 100m (328ft) that had caved in on the Tokyo-bound lanes on the Chuo Expressway in Yamanashi prefecture.
Thick black smoke was seen coming out of the tunnel, hampering rescuers.
The rescue then had to be suspended for several hours because a further collapse was feared.
When it resumed, the first fatalities were found.
A spokesman for Yamanashi Prefectural Police told Agence France-Presse: "A number of charred bodies were confirmed inside. The number of dead is not known."
One woman was taken to hospital after she had made her way out of the tunnel.
She said she was with five other people in a van, but added: "I have no idea about what happened to the five others. I don't know how many vehicles were ahead and behind ours."
A reporter for the NHK broadcaster described driving through the tunnel as it began to collapse, seeing other cars trapped and on fire. His car was badly damaged, he said.
Another survivor told the broadcaster that he saw "a concrete part of the ceiling fall off all of a sudden when I was driving inside. I saw a fire coming from a crushed car".
He added that he was "frightened" and walked for an hour to get out of the tunnel.
The Sasago tunnel is an estimated 4.3km (2.7 miles) long.
The twin-bore tunnel is on one of the major highways out of Tokyo, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield Hayes in Japan reports.
The road has had to be closed because of the seriousness of the accident, our correspondent says.
It is not clear what may have caused the roof to collapse.
Japan is prone to large earthquakes, but none were reported in the area this morning, our correspondent says.
The tunnel's closure, he says, is expected to bring traffic chaos as thousands of weekend travellers head back to Tokyo on Sunday afternoon.
Japan's geology is pretty active. Even if they didn't have an earthquake at the time of the collapse, that tunnel, like the rest of Japan, has been subjected to very strong tremors in the recent past that may have sufficiently weakened the ground around it, or the tunnel structure, so that the structure eventually failed.
Or maybe some other reason, but ground-shaking is bad for tunnels so it's a reasonable place to start looking for answers.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Part of concrete liner collapsed, but not the tunnel itself. Couple different things could have caused that, and probably all of them detectable. It wouldn't be surprising if this turns out to be like the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the problem was noticed by inspections but incorrectly evaluated for one reason or another. Worth noting that the infamous 1996 Furubira tunnel collapse also involved the tunnel proper being sound, but bad calculations as to the stability of the cliff above it led to the discovery that the portal roof of the tunnel could not withstand a 50,000 ton boulder falling on it.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Just how many man-made structures could survive an impact by a 50,000 ton boulder?
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
One or two of the best U-boat pens covered in a similar manner might be able to withstand that, maybe, but only because the rock slid down a short distance, rather then free falling. The tunnel was poorly thought out. They expected such large and constant landslides that a 40m long concrete extension of the portal was built precisely to protect against rockfall, this was then covered with some number of feet I forget worth of loose rock backfill to protect the concrete from the expected impacts chipping it. The 50,000 ton rock pierced this area and crushed two vehicles, while the actual tunneled part of the tunnel was completely undamaged. They should have blasted back the slope to a shallower angle instead of building such an elaborate but cheaper structure; this is what was done for the repair. It can't really be explained as all hindsight either, since the rock was known to be weak, fractured lava, and a large notch existed and was observed at the base of the place the boulder fractured from. The tunnel was under ten years old when the landslide happened. This one is from the 1970s.
The real infamy of the 1996 tunnel though was how fucked up the 'rescue' was, I can only hope this one is more rationally led, even if in all likely hood like the tunnel at Furubira, everyone died instantly. The bus at Furubira was about 1ft high when they finally got it out.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
