Joe Biden’s departure from the G-7 summit on Tuesday afternoon actually stopped enough people around Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The US president only gets around in his own vehicles, and because his helicopter pilots didn’t have enough opportunity to practice approaching and departing through the Wetterstein Mountains, Biden covered part of the way in his car known as “The Beast.” The so-called protocol route remained closed to all other road users for hours.
But long before things were going again elsewhere, the Farchant Tunnel was soon closed again, and the traffic jam in front of it was getting longer and longer. Because no sooner had Biden’s beast driven through the tunnel than the radio amplifiers went crazy inside. Instead of making the police and fire brigade radio signals receivable in the tube, the amplifiers themselves went on the air with an interference signal that sometimes chopped up the communication between the police and rescue services in the region into snippets of speech that were difficult to understand.
In any case, the police, who were present in an almost unmanageable strength and all the more in need of communication, soon informed the building authority in Weilheim responsible for the tunnel. The office had the amplifiers switched off – and at the same time the tunnel blocked, since its safety concept is invalid without radio in the tubes. While normal traffic and also the withdrawing police from other federal states struggled through Farchant in columns, a technician rushed over from Vienna who was able to tame the amplifiers in the tunnel early Wednesday evening. The building authority describes it as unlikely that the problem may have come from the jammers in Biden’s entourage, which are intended to protect the president from radio-controlled attacks, but do not rule it out entirely.