INTERVIEW
Two dead, including a 15-year-old girl. This is still the provisional balance sheet of the collapse of a suspension bridge that spans the river Tarn on Monday morning in Mirepoix-sur-Tarn, north-east of Toulouse. Guest of the Great Evening Newspaper a few hours after this tragedy, Michel Virlogeux, bridge engineer and designer of renowned works such as the Millau Viaduct, believes that "this book had no reason to be in bad shape". "It was not part of the list of works considered to be in a more or less difficult state," he notes.
Heard on europe1:
We have rules of calculation, fixed by the regulations, which put us safe
Built in 1935, the building, banned from vehicles over 19 tons, had been inspected in 2017 and had revealed "no structural problem", with only "normal evolutionary disorders", according to the county council of Haute-Garonne, on which depends the maintenance of the work.
The preferred hypothesis is that of a collapse due to the passage of a vehicle much too heavy, the truck that would have been found in the Tarn, which would have been almost twice the authorized weight. "It is perfectly clear that if a bridge has been sized for 19 tons, it is certainly not ready to take a load of 40 tons," says the expert, also responsible for the Normandy Bridge.
>> READ ALSO - Collapse of a bridge near Toulouse: "Do not wait for disasters to react", alert Hervé Maurey
This drama, reminiscent of the collapse of the bridge of Genoa in August 2018, could it be repeated? Michel Virlogeux is cautious. "After Genoa, many questions have been asked about the state of the bridges, some are not in a remarkable state, but we are far from being in a hyper critical situation. the regulations, which protect us, for example, when we built the Normandy Bridge [between 1989 and 1995], we did simulations with the traffic of the heaviest French motorways, and we could hardly 30% of computing loads ".