Paris (AFP)

The collapse of the motorway viaduct of Genoa (Italy), which left 43 dead on August 14, 2018, led the French authorities to embark on a vast census of the works of art of the Hexagon, some of which are very bad. state.

"We are not in a catastrophic situation," said Alain Bonnafous, emeritus professor at Lyon 2 University, "The network is working well and the surveillance is pretty good in France, but there is aging infrastructure", which are the result of "significant under-investment in recent years", according to him.

Before the drama of Genoa, Elisabeth Borne - current Minister for the Ecological Transition and at the time in charge of Transport alone - had requested an audit of Swiss specialists.

Conclusion: 30% of the 12,000 bridges in the national road network not granted to private companies need repairs, 7% of them even having a "risk of collapse" in the long term.

Without significant budget increases, 6% of bridges will be "out of service" by 2037, the report predicts.

The condition of the 12,000 bridges of the conceded network (mainly motorways) is better, with some exceptions such as the Echinghen viaduct, on the A16 near Boulogne-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais).

The government published in September 2018 a first list of the state of the 164 largest books in the country (with the promise to expand): 23 of them needed work.

"This classification of the state of the bridges is a tool to indicate the level of the necessary repairs and their degree of urgency.It does not translate a security risk," the ministry told AFP.

The works are indeed monitored, and circulation is partially or totally prohibited if the inspection missions detect weaknesses.

The Senate has taken the problem by extending its investigations to the rest of the road network.

According to a report published in June, "at least 25,000 bridges are in poor structural condition and pose safety and availability problems for users".

Among these problematic works, the senatorial mission of information on the safety of the bridges counted 7% of the bridges of the State, 8.5% of the bridges of the departments, and "probably 18 to 20%" of the bridges of the communes and intercommunal.

With uncertainty in the "absence of an exhaustive census of bridges managed by local authorities", she lamented: "the exact number of road bridges in France is not known!". There would be between 200,000 and 250,000.

And senators to ask for a "Marshall Plan" to renovate bridges in ten years, focusing on assistance to small territorial communities.

The Ministry of the Ecological Transition emphasizes that the credits dedicated to road maintenance, including bridges, have increased significantly since the beginning of the five-year period.

He also sees in the work of senators "a number of interesting leads that will be studied in detail, especially concerning the support of communities in the diagnosis of the state of their structures".

© 2019 AFP