Railway Safety and Security

Clients may not always understand the safety and security implications of their project, but they must understand that today’s decisions may have an impact for years to come. So many variables need to be analyzed when working in safety and security.

Hazards may be accidental, natural, criminal or terrorist in nature. In fact, anything that can affect transport systems should be treated as a potential threat, be analyzed, and acted upon if needed.

Finding the Approach to Mitigate all Hazards

With our knowledge and experience, our teams at WSP provide an approach where safety, security, and emergency management meet to mitigate all potential hazards.

We offer assistance to develop System Safety Program Plans, System Security Programs and Plans, and Security Emergency Management Program Plans. This includes the development of preliminary hazard analyses, threats and vulnerability assessments, safety and security certification and emergency preparedness and finally system safety program development and implementation.

Our objective is to cover all bases when it comes to safety and security, which means we offer prevention, protection, and in the occurrence of any event, response and recovery.

Our services include:

• Strategic risk management
• Security technology evaluation
• Risk analytics
• Crisis management and security operations

For the California High-Speed Rail project, we provided safety and security services in support of the CAHSR program, including development and management of the Safety and Security Management Plan.

Innovative Solutions for Tunnel Safety

Even though eliminating 100% of the risk is impossible, our teams at WSP understand that tunnels and stations are susceptible to a range of threats and hazards.

We have built a unique blast design capability, developed through an internal research program. We also participated in the development of the TRB guidelines “Making Transportation Tunnels Safe and Secure,” and worked on the actual design and retrofit of numerous tunnel structures, such as the SFMTA Central subway and the Istanbul Strait Road Tube Crossing (Eurasia Tunnel).

We provide:

• 3D coupled Euler-Lagrange nonlinear dynamic models to assess structural dynamic response at any location within the tunnel, shaft and associated structures.
• New theories and practices to evaluate the interactions between explosives, structures and surrounding grounds.
• Procedure to design a tunnel under explosion loadings, including vulnerability/risk assessment, development of threat scenarios, risk analysis, sophisticated three-dimensional coupled nonlinear dynamic blast analysis, post-blast analysis, including development of tunnel blast protection measures, and recommendation of system countermeasures.

Our approach is responsive to the transportation industry needs and to the regulatory requirements. We strive to help our clients in building a real safety culture based on knowledge, compliance and constant improvement.