Hats off! Demolition master Eduard Reisch and his team have precisely blasted the damaged Salzbachtal bridge and apparently avoided collateral damage. With this, the demolition master has taken the first step to cure the Wiesbaden traffic blackout. But nothing has been won yet, because only when the main train station is back on the network and the new bridge can be driven will the situation on the streets of the state capital at least partially normalize. The mayor of Wiesbaden, Gert-Uwe Mende (SPD), also knows this, and after the demolition he expressed the hope that the nightmare would soon be over.
But this is not to be expected anytime soon, because the south bridge should not be accessible again until 2023.
Until then, the A 66 near Wiesbaden will remain closed, the journey from Frankfurt to the Rheingau will be cumbersome, and commuters and companies in the state capital and the surrounding cities will have to continue to find their way through the everyday chaos.
Bitter failure
The city can do nothing for the damaged bridge, because the Landesbetrieb Hessen Mobil was responsible for the bridge until the end of last year, since then it has been the federal government.
It had been known since 2009 that the bridge was dilapidated and had to be renovated.
The fact that the Salzbachtalbrücke threatened to collapse almost twelve years later and had to be blown up bitterly proves the failure of state politics.
According to the assessment of Transport Minister Tarek Al-Wazir (The Greens), every tenth of the 4,000 or so bridges in Hesse is a case of renovation, albeit not to the same extent as the Salzbachtal Bridge.
However, this illustrates the extent of the problem: This gigantic renovation backlog harms the economy, commuters and, due to long traffic jams, not least the environment.
So that the Wiesbaden bridge disaster does not have exclusively negative consequences, the demolition of the Salzbachtal bridge must therefore be understood as a wake-up call.
The state and federal governments are called upon to massively accelerate the renovation and renovation of ailing bridges and roads, because a functioning infrastructure is also part of the provision of public services.
Hopefully there will be no further delays and errors when building the new Salzbachtal bridge, because an entire region is waiting for the new bridge standing in a traffic jam.