Activists from the environmental collective “Last renovation” and its Italian counterpart “Ultima Generazione” blocked Friday, since 12:30 p.m., the two entrances to the Mont Blanc tunnel, in Chamonix on the French side and in Aosta on the Italian side, they announced.
“With one voice, citizens are demanding that our governments take climate action. This world is being doomed before our eyes,” they wrote on Twitter in a series of posts accompanied by photos of several people, waving a banner, blocking a road leading to the tunnel.
“The economic impact of this lockdown is nothing compared to the billions of euros wasted every day burning fossil fuels. Our governments have been walled in a wait-and-see attitude for too long and are not even capable of respecting their own commitments,” they point out.
The formation of a “1 km plug”
The Autoroutes et Tunnel du Mont Blanc (ATMB) group reports on its website that “access to the Mont Blanc tunnel is interrupted by demonstrators on the French side” with the formation of a “1 km plug”. “The ATMB teams and the gendarmerie services are on site”, adds the group, indicating that it does not have “more information at this stage”.
The Mont-Blanc tunnel, a strategic traffic axis linking France and Italy in the Alps, is usually used every day by thousands of cars and heavy goods vehicles.