A stubbornness that caused a nightmare situation. Wednesday evening, “between 400 and 500 vehicles” remained stuck on the A75 motorway, near Clermont-Ferrand, for three hours. Several motorists were forced to spend the night at a gas station in Issoire, reports TF1. This Thursday morning, the trucks were still not allowed to get back on the road.
In question, the “inappropriate conduct” of a heavy goods vehicle driver, who “tried to climb a slope that he should not have”, denounces the Puy-de-Dôme prefecture, recalling that ten to fifteen centimeters of snow fell in the area at the height of the day. Result: the vehicle slid across the road and “jackknifed”. Others, however, had chosen to park in a motorway rest area or on the emergency lane given the state of the road.
“No lack of anticipation”
Enough to create a nice mess. “It was a massacre”, testifies on RMC Maxime, heavy goods vehicle driver. “All traffic was stopped [vers 20 heures], we tried to understand what was happening, we didn’t know.” We had to wait until 10 p.m., he said, for the gendarmes to tell the trucks to pull over to the right.
“There was no lack of anticipation,” Joël Mathurin, the prefect of Puy-de-Dôme, defended himself at the time of the assessment, recalling that arbitrations had been made upstream. The movement of heavy goods vehicles was prohibited on the A89, where “the differences in height are significant” with “slopes of 5-7%”. “On the A75, a motorway normally more passable, the salt spreaders passed. If the driving had been adapted, the flow of trucks could have continued,” he concludes.
The situation was “restored around 11 p.m.”, while the ban on the circulation of heavy goods vehicles was finally lifted late Thursday morning.