Fire and Water, the Crossrail Experience
Summary
Like many major urban centres, London is faced with an ever increasing population and the need to transport people safely and efficiently across a sprawling city landscape. The Crossrail project will provide an East-West link from the suburbs and across the city enabling an additional 200 million journeys each year linking up major business centres and existing transportation interchanges, while reducing congestion at street level and within the existing busy underground system.
This paper will outline the scheme, and in particular, examine the technical approaches taken by the project to deal with waterproofing underground structures and the fire protection strategy adopted for the main structural materials in the tunnels, with a summary of the methods used and tests undertaken, including some lessons learnt and approaches that might be used again or refined further on future projects.