Picture by Reuters/Pascal Rossignol

A fire in the Channel Tunnel was put out yesterday almost 20 hours after it took hold on a freight train, and the tunnel operator said passenger services between Britain and France should resume soon. An official said there were indications the fire had started by accident but it was too early to identify the exact cause.

A 700m section of the eastbound tunnel was severely burnt – almost the same distance as in the 1996 fire that shut one of the twin tunnels under the Channel for six months.

The other single-track tunnel is unscathed and was poised to reopen today, which should relieve some of the chaos and confusion for tens of thousands of travelers. However, a complete service cannot resume until both tunnels are open.

The blaze, which reached temperatures over 1,000°C and took 16 hours to extinguish, destroyed almost all the 27 trucks and an 800m freight shuttle bound for Calais. Earlier official reports said only three trucks had burnt.

Doubts also emerged yesterday about the probable cause of the blaze. French officials initially said the fire started in the overheated brake system of one truck aboard the shuttle. Eurotunnel rejected that explanation yesterday and said it was too early to say how the fire had started.

Witness accounts by lorry drivers, travelling in a passenger carriage separate from their trucks, spoke of a “series” of explosions. French government officials said they assumed those explosions had been caused by the fire. Despite the date of the blaze – 11 September – government and Eurotunnel officials remain convinced the fire had started accidentally.

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