Analysis of critical incidents in tunnels to improve learning from experience

•Complexity of incidents is as important as severity for road-tunnel operating.•Internal and external cooperation is a key factor to contain critical incidents.•Collective anticipating and improvising are essential skills for safety management.•Critical incidents technique is relevant to study collective work for safety. In road tunnels, learning from experience is mainly focused on major events that occur in tunnels. But the management of traffic incidents or technical incidents is part of the daily work of Control Room supervisors and tunnel patrollers. Based on 17 individual interviews conducted with the critical incident technique (Flanaghan, 1954), our paper aims identifying the critical situations that professionals face, collecting and analyzing the safety practices and the cooperation practices deployed by each professional group to improve safety organization and learning from experience in the company. Our results show that critical incidents for the operators are mostly common action situations, but in complex or dynamic environment. The nature of accounted critical incidents is very much related to the profession and type of activity. As supervisors play a key role in incidents detection and psychological support for patrollers, patrollers use resource management and anticipation strategies to control the danger and contain event. The analysis revealed also the impact of tunnel user behavior on operators’ activity as a source of disruption. Critical incident narratives underscore the fundamental role of cooperation when it comes to anticipating and regulating critical incidents, within each professional group but also on a cross-disciplinary and inter-organizational basis. Then, we will discuss how these results can be used to improve learning from experience, operators’ skills and collective activity organization.