INTERVIEW
While a road bridge spanning the Tarn collapsed Monday in Mirepoix-sur-Tarn, near Toulouse (causing the death of a 15-year-old girl and the disappearance of at least one person), Hervé Maurey , senator of the Eure (centrist Union) and president of the mission of information on the safety of the bridges, does not say himself surprised by such a catastrophe.
"The report we submitted to the government in July is entitled Safety bridges, avoid a tragedy, so we felt that there was a real danger of bridges," said Hervé Maurey, adding that, according to this report, about "29,000 bridges in France present a real danger".
"A true Marshall Plan of bridges"
To solve these problems, Hervé Maurey pleads for "a true Marshall Plan bridges", ie for "substantial means implemented to ensure safety." He also pleads for "the state increases its credits for the maintenance of its bridges".
He believes that a diagnosis must first be made, ie "establish a true audit of all our bridges since in most cases, we do not even know in which state they are . " In a second time, he asks for an "upgrade of our bridges to avoid a tragedy, which, unfortunately, took place this morning".
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According to the departmental council of Haute-Garonne, on which depends the maintenance of the work, this bridge "was not listed as a sensitive work" and did not benefit from a particular surveillance. "This perfectly illustrates the fact that we have a very poor knowledge of the real state of the bridges", reacts Hervé Maurey, explaining that "we should not, as is often done in France, wait for disasters to react ".
The memory of the Mont Blanc tunnel fire
In this regard, he recalls that the incident in the Mont Blanc Tunnel alone had provoked a necessary awareness. "We were concerned about tunnels from when, twenty years ago, there was the catastrophe of the Mont Blanc tunnel, at which time the state was able to to release 130 million euros a year for twenty years to upgrade our tunnels ", explains Hervé Maurey.
To find solutions, the senator thinks that we need to take the lead in managing the crisis after this disaster. "There must be a fund that is fed, every year, as we did for the Mont Blanc tunnel, so that the 200,000 bridges that fall under the communes and departments, are the subject of a serious diagnosis and then there are ways to help local communities to restore these bridges, "he defends.
A worrying situation in the communes
For the moment, Hervé Maurey regrets the lack of resources allocated to the various decision-making scales. "The departments have pretty much the means to do it because they have technical services and a certain number of resources, but in the communes, you have even greater budgetary constraints and, above all, you do not have the services and the internal technical skills to monitor the condition of the bridges and restore them ", he grieves, claiming to have visited" some municipalities where the bridges had been purely and simply closed because the municipalities could not do the work required."