People heading from France to England via the Channel Tunnel had an experience Tuesday that some—especially those with a fear of enclosed spaces—found terrifying. Passengers on a Eurotunnel Le Shuttle service carrying hundreds of passengers and their vehicles were stranded deep under the English Channel for around five hours after a train broke down, the Guardian reports. Passengers said the train broke down around 10 minutes after it left Calais bound for Folkestone. After around 90 minutes, it started moving again, then stopped for another couple of hours. At that point, passengers were instructed to walk for around a mile through a service tunnel to board another train, which also experienced problems.
"It was like a disaster movie. You were just walking into the abyss not knowing what was happening. We all had to stay under the sea in this big queue," passenger Sarah Fellows told the PA news agency. "There was a woman crying in the tunnel, another woman having a panic attack who was traveling alone," she said. "They were expecting really older people to walk for a mile down the middle of a tunnel under the sea." Passengers complained about a lack of communication from staff and said high temperatures in the tunnel were an issue, CNN reports.
A Le Shuttle spokesman told the BBC that after alarms went off on the first train, as a "precautionary measure, for their safety and comfort, we transferred the passengers on-board to another shuttle, via the service tunnel [which is there for exactly that purpose]." He said the first train was "slowly brought out" of the tunnel and passengers were reunited with their vehicles at the Folkestone, England, terminal. Le Shuttle said passengers will be compensated. The Channel Tunnel has a 23.5-miles underwater section, the longest in the world. (More Channel Tunnel stories.)
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