2023-10-15 11:28:25
The entrance to the Mont-Blanc tunnel, French side, September 2, 2023. JEFF PACHOUD / AFP
The Mont-Blanc tunnel, a major road between France and Italy, closes Monday October 16 until December 18 for maintenance work planned for the beginning of September but postponed.
Inaugurated in 1965 and used daily by thousands of vehicles, the sustainability of this bidirectional structure with a length of 11.6 kilometers requires work “important”as the French concession company Autoroutes et tunnel du Mont-Blanc (ATMB) explained to Agence France-Presse (AFP) in September.
For nine weeks, the work will concern the replacement of slab elements in the central portion of the tunnel and the change of the ventilation devices on the vault, detailed on September 27 the manager of the work, GEIE-TMB. This work will precede a “test site renovation of the vault (…) postponed to 2024 »according to the same source.
Fifteen weeks of closure for maintenance work had originally been planned from the beginning of September and was postponed after a spectacular landslide, which caused the closure of the railway, motorway and tunnel on August 27 du Fréjus, in the Maurienne valley, another of the major routes between France and Italy.
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5,300 vehicles per day in normal times
The postponement of road traffic at the end of summer led to monster traffic jams for several days at the Mont-Blanc tunnel, where normally around 1,700 heavy goods vehicles and 3,600 light vehicles travel per day.
If road traffic has resumed in the Maurienne valley, rail traffic will not be restored “before a little year”, according to a schedule mentioned by the prefect of Savoie, François Ravier, to the local press on September 29. Substitute buses will replace trains during the period.
According to the GEIE-TMB, “around 90% of heavy goods vehicles will move” towards the Fréjus tunnel due to the maintenance site.
The long closure planned for Monday is a first for the Mont-Blanc tunnel since its reopening in 2002, after the fire which ravaged it on March 24, 1999, costing the lives of 39 people. The operators, who are also carrying out renovation work on part of the slab, have until now always managed to stick to nighttime closures, apart from a three-week period in the fall of 2022.
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