Tag Archives: 2008

11 September 2008

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A major Channel Tunnel fire breaks out on a freight train, resulting in the closure of part of the tunnel for six months.

When a fire closed the Channel Tunnel in 11 September 2008, the struggling operator Eurotunnel no doubt consoled itself with one thought: its insurers would pay up. More than two years and a half years later, however, Eurotunnel remains embroiled in a legal battle with the train operators that use its infrastructure between Britain and the Continent.

Consequently, like any punter kept waiting for their car or contents insurer to pay out, Eurotunnel – the operator of the 30-mile road and rail link – is feeling the financial pain of a delay in receiving one of the biggest ever corporate insurance payouts. Yesterday, the rail operator swung to a €57m loss for 2010, compared with a profit of €7m the previous year, and it blamed its woes firmly on the “freezing of €59m of indemnities”, although it was paid €11m of this in February.

However, what makes the dispute more colourful is that this freezing is the result of the rail operators who use the tunnel, Eurostar and SNCF, lodging a claim in 2009 against the same insurance claim lodged by Eurotunnel itself, instead of seeking indemnities through their own insurers. In simple terms, Eurostar and SNCF sought compensation from an insurance policy that they were not even paying for.

While Eurostar declined to comment on the matter, an extract from Eurotunnel’s 2009 accounts suggests that it and SNCF felt that because the fire resulted in disruption to their businesses from an incident outside the remit of their own insurance policies, they should lodge a claim for compensation with Eurotunnel’s insurers.

In the report, the tunnel operator said: “Eurotunnel’s insurers have received from the railways a claim for compensation relating to the fire on 11 September 2008 in respect of their own operating losses, as the railways consider that Eurotunnel’s insurers should also compensate them for their operating losses following the fire.”

Certainly, it is fair to say that Eurotunnel probably did not expect to be facing a legal battle so long after the fire in September 2008, which led to it closing one-sixth of the tunnel for about five months. Eurotunnel has put the total cost of the damage caused by the fire at about €290m, including the rebuilding of the affected tunnel, compensation for the loss of an entire freight train, and its operating losses.

After Eurostar lodged its claim in May 2009 at a commercial court in Paris, the French court froze the part of the process relating to the outstanding indemnity of €48m. Jacques Gounon, the chairman of Eurotunnel, said: “The delay in payment of the insurance indemnities has impacted heavily on our net result but the group is working to rectify this situation.”

Eurotunnel said the €57m loss in 2010 was due to the absence of insurance payouts, as well as €4.5m linked to the reconditioning of a shuttle.

Aside from the insurance dispute, Eurotunnel said its revenues rose by 26 per cent to €737m last year. Stripping out the financial impact of its insurance battles, it expects to break even this year. The number of Eurostar passengers grew by 3 per cent to 9.5m in 2010.

Eurotunnel’s path to reinvention has been long and tortuous, with the trouble starting almost as soon as the company was formed in 1986.

Delays and disputes with contractors pushed the tunnel’s opening date back from May 1993 to November 1994, and the cost ballooned from £4.7bn to £9.5bn, of which an eye-watering £8bn was debt.

15 September 2008

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Lehman Brothers files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the largest bankruptcy filing in USA history.

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Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, succumbed to the subprime mortgage crisis it helped create in the biggest bankruptcy filing in history.

The 158-year-old firm, which survived railroad bankruptcies of the 1800s, the Great Depression in the 1930s and the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management a decade ago, filed a Chapter 11 petition with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan on Monday. The collapse of Lehman, which listed more than US$613-billion of debt, dwarves WorldCom Inc.’s insolvency in 2002 and Drexel Burnham Lambert’s failure in 1990.

Lehman was forced into bankruptcy after Barclays PLC and Bank of America Corp. abandoned takeover talks on Sunday and the company lost 94% of its market value this year. Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld, who turned the New York-based firm into the biggest underwriter of mortgage-backed securities at the top of the U.S. real estate market, joins his counterparts at Bear Stearns Cos., Merrill Lynch & Co. and more than 10 banks that couldn’t survive this year’s credit crunch.

Lehman shares dropped 81% in Frankfurt trading to 75 cents from their US$3.65 close in New York on Friday. UBS AG, HBOS PLC, and Axa SA led a decline of more than 3% for European stock markets on speculation a forced sale of Lehman’s assets could lead to further writedowns at other banks.

11 September 2008

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A major fire in Channel Tunnel broke out on a freight train. Part of the tunnel is closed for 6 months.

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Firefighters endured extreme temperatures and cramped quarters as they extinguished an intense blaze in the undersea train tunnel that has revolutionized travel between France and England.

The fire deep under the English Channel left the British Isles cut off for more than a day from continental Europe other than by sea or air – the only routes that existed before the undersea tunnel opened to passengers in 1994.

Laboring through the night, firefighters painstakingly worked toward each other from separate ends in France and Britain to combat the blaze, which broke out Thursday afternoon aboard one of the trains that whiz back and forth through the 30-mile tunnel, transporting trucks and holidaymakers’ cars.

Firefighters spent no more than 15 minutes at a time inside the tunnel, because of the intense temperatures of up to around 1,830 degrees. The blaze was declared extinguished around midday.

Five of 14 people injured remained in hospitals Friday, said prosecutor Gerald Lesigne, who was investigating the blaze. Officials said some people had inhaled large quantities of smoke; others hurt their hands by breaking the train’s windows to escape.

Officials appeared to rule out terrorism as a cause of the blaze, one of the most serious incidents in the history of the tunnel that has made day trips between Paris and London possible by high-speed train.

The fire was in the tunnel that runs from England to France. Its burned sections could be closed for weeks.The tunnel has had a few fires in the past, including one in 1996 that shut freight traffic for months.

People suffered smoke inhalation injuries because they evacuated the train themselves before tunnel operators had ventilated away the smoke, as safety procedures call for.

2 May 2008

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cyclone Nargis makes kills over 138,000 people in Burma.

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In early May 2008, Burma was struck by Cyclone Nargis, which left over 138,000 dead and tens of thousands injured, and 2.5 million homeless. It was the worst natural disaster ever in Myanmar (Burma). Damage was estimated at over $10 billion, which made it the most damaging cyclone ever recorded in this basin. The Myanmar government estimated the storm completely destroyed 450,000 of 800,000 homes hit. Associated Press called it “Asia’s answer to Hurricane Katrina”—except it was much more deadly.

Packing winds upwards of 195 kph, Cyclone Nargis became one of Asia’s deadliest storms by hitting land at one of the lowest points in Myanmar and setting off a storm surge that reached over 40 kilometers (25 miles) inland. Among the worst areas were Labutta, Bogale, Pyapon, Dedaye and Kyaiklat. More than 400,000 hectares of farmland were flooded with seawater and more than 200,000 drafts animals were killed in the Yangon and Irrawaddy areas. Before the storm hit this area produced 3.3 million tons of crops on 900,000 hectares of land in the monsoon season and 1 million tons of crops on 200,000 hectares in the summer. Initially some said that crops could only be raised on 40 percent of the damaged land and loses could clip two percent off Myanmar’s GDP for 2008 but after the disaster journalists reported that crops were raised in many places thought to be unable to produce crops.

Cyclone Nargis was a rare, eastward-moving, low-latitude, strong tropical cyclone. It made landfall in the evening of May 2, 2008 and lashed Myanmar for three days. It sent a storm surges 40 kilometers up the densely-populated Irrawaddy Delta. Nargis advanced eastward along the coastal delta region, over rivers, other waterways and villages surrounded by paddy fields. The cyclone initially hit the land with wind speeds of up to 194 kph, and later accelerated to a top speed of 238 kph. The name “Nargis” is an Urdu word meaning daffodil.