“I was called about a door problem on an RER at Châtelet station and when I got to the end of the platform, I saw passengers a little further down the tunnel getting out of another RER. »When Mélissa discovers this spontaneous evacuation, she immediately contacts her hierarchy and sets out on the tracks to check the messy flow of travelers. Because Mélissa, a versatile supervisor at RATP for ten years, is also the incident manager in the event of a glitch on the RER A, at least on the RATP part. Deployed on the field, she coordinates the teams in the event of an evacuation in collaboration with the Single Command Center (CCU) located at the Vincennes RER station.
And evacuations, which are the obsession of travelers, are also for the RATP. They are both complex and dangerous and the Parisian carrier goes to great lengths to avoid them. It is with this in mind that the CCU was formed in February 2019, which brings together the RATP, the SNCF and manages “incidents in real time in connection with the agents in the stations”, explains Philippe Lopez, director of line a.
The risk of accidents
“The RER A is 1.1 million passengers a day with trains every 2’30 during rush hour,” he recalls. Consequently, in the event of a train block, you can quickly find yourself with other trains stopped in the interstations, that is, in the tunnels. “The inconvenience of a traveler and it is a stop of 7 to 10 minutes and therefore potentially 3-4 trains that accumulate in a tunnel”, specifies Mathieu Hemour, head of the transport division of the RER. And this, the RATP wants to avoid at all costs because an evacuation generally generates secondary accidents and because the evacuation of the 2,500 passengers of a train on the tracks takes between an hour and an hour and a half, sometimes more if the train is stopped far from a station.
So as soon as a train driver reports a problem to the CCU, the supervisor, or head nurse, and his three regulators go to great lengths to limit trains in interstations by asking trains following the victim of an accident to stay at the train station. . “We prefer to evacuate passengers at the dock rather than in a tunnel,” comments Philippe Lopez. In general, if the accident is not resolved within half an hour, it is decided to evacuate the train.
Avoid panic
But because passengers have to wait, the RATP “has done a lot of work on the driver’s speech because it reduces travelers’ anxiety,” explains the line manager. Because, and this is not a surprise, panic never produces positive effects. Thus, sounding the alarm signal of a stopped train frees the doors and therefore allows passengers to get off the tracks, the famous spontaneous evacuation. “In these cases, we cut the power to stop the trains and prevent any risk of electrocution,” says Mathieu Hemour.
This is what happened on 18 July on the RER B and D at the Gare du Nord. Due to a suspected passenger on the tracks, a message was sent to all trains to stop. Except that in one of the trains, probably due to the scorching heat of that day, “the alarm went off after two minutes”, says the head of the RER transport pole. And it was the beginning of the spontaneous evacuation that completely paralyzed the traffic. Not to mention that it was also necessary to prevent other travelers from accessing the platforms in order not to hinder evacuation.
It is in this type of situation that Mélissa intervenes to “manage and guide travelers”. But she and her colleagues, about fifteen permanently on the RER A section managed by the RATP, manage not only the flows. Above all, they are “the eyes and ears of the CCU”. “Since 2018 and the evacuations on Line 1, we have trained these agents so that they can intervene on the tracks,” says Philippe Lopez. Mélissa is thus able to drive a train in the event of a driver’s breakdown, and it is she who makes the decisions on the ground in accordance with the CCU. And in the event of an evacuation, she will always lead the rear. So for him to avoid cold sweats, do not activate the alarm signal lightly.
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