Improved resilience of metro vehicle design to blast and fire events

In the framework of the European FP7 SECUREMETRO project, the authors have studied the occurrences of terrorist attacks against metro trains with the goal to reduce the number of attacks by making transport systems a less attractive target. In addition to the counter-measures already implemented to increase the resilience to terrorism, the SECUREMETRO project adds another layer of countermeasures aimed at mitigating the effects of an attack to the vehicles, should the others fail to prevent it. This work takes into account the identified common attack methodologies and the behavior of the surviving passengers in order to improve the situation management, assist the evacuation of and rescue to survivors. Moreover, technological improvements to the structure and critical systems of the vehicle have been devised and tested in real situation. This paper focuses particularly on the behavior of people in blast situation, and presents the conclusions of the project on these effects and the related design improvements.