The Mont-Blanc tunnel, a major road between France and Italy, closes Monday for two months, until December 18 for maintenance work planned for a long time and postponed after a massive landslide at the end of August in the Maurienne valley .
Built 60 years ago, used daily by thousands of vehicles, the sustainability of this bidirectional structure with a length of 11.6 km requires “significant” work, as the company explained to AFP in September French concessionaire Autoroutes et Tunnel du Mont-Blanc (ATMB). “To allow this renovation work to be carried out, traffic is completely interrupted under the Mont-Blanc tunnel from Monday October 16 at 8 a.m. The reopening of the tunnel is scheduled for Monday December 18, 2023 at 10 p.m.”, specifies in a press release Bison Fûté.
The August landslide to blame
For nine weeks, the work will concern the replacement of slab elements in the central portion of the tunnel and the change of accelerators (fans) on the vault, detailed the manager of the GEIE-TMB work on September 27.
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, but the schedule changed after a spectacular landslide which caused the closure of the railway, the motorway and the road on August 27. Fréjus tunnel, in the Maurienne valley, another of the major routes between France and Italy.
The postponement of road traffic that occurred 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. According to the GEIE-TMB, “around 90% of heavy goods vehicles will head” towards the Fréjus tunnel due to the maintenance site.
Such a long first closure
If road traffic has resumed in the Maurienne valley, rail traffic will not be restored “for a short year”, according to a timetable mentioned by the prefect of Savoie François Ravier to the local press on September 29. Substitute buses will replace trains over the period.
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.