Closed for a good cause. Wednesday for the first and Thursday for the second, the Thouaré and Mauves bridges, crossing the Loire near Nantes, will be closed to traffic during the day (between 9:30 a.m. and 5 p.m.), warns the department of Loire-Atlantique. Disturbances linked to the “Connected Bridges” experiment in which the two structures are taking part, and whose objective is to improve the monitoring of bridges. A necessity for the government, at the origin of the call for projects, launched in particular after the collapse of the Mirepoix-sur-Tarn bridge in 2019, which had killed two people.
Last December, sensors were installed on these structures by a team of rope access technicians. Over the next few days, load tests will be carried out in order to calibrate them. In the long term, the objective is to ensure the monitoring of this type of bridge “from an instrumentation by optical cords and accelerometers”, specifies the county council which has volunteered to make its works available. The experimental device should make it possible to study in detail “the mechanical behavior of the structures”, and therefore to anticipate any problems more easily.