Foxes and squirrels were apparently the first to venture there, before being quickly joined by more varied fauna. Retirees and young children on bikes have paraded on the A13 over the past ten days; teenagers balancing on a wheel rushed into the Saint-Cloud tunnel; when others, of the same age, played with the echo of their voices on the walls. Joggers obviously took advantage of the opportunity to run on the asphalt, which had suddenly become deserted.
This timeless parenthesis, some scenes of which recall those moments of confinement when ducks crossed the streets of the capital, emptied of all cars, is over. The motorway which runs towards Normandy, the section between Vaucresson and the ring road has been completely closed to traffic since April 18, after the appearance of a crack across the road, must partly reopen on Friday May 10 . Initially, only light vehicles, that is to say less than 3.5 tonnes, will be authorized to use one lane, in the province-Paris direction. Surface repair work must still be carried out by then.
This decision should provide some relief to motorists who usually use this route – 70,000 vehicles per day – to go to work, return home or go on weekends, and who, for two weeks, have had to find alternatives .
Strong suspicions
However, they are not at the end of their troubles. The three other traffic lanes will probably not reopen before the end of June, announced the Hauts-de-Seine prefecture in a press release published Tuesday May 7. The departmental council must rehabilitate a sewerage pipe, two meters in diameter, which passes under the roadway and on which worrying cracks have been detected.
To reach the cylinder located five meters deep, the construction teams have no other choice but to dig a trench in the road. This work should begin next week. Once completed, the services of the Ile-de-France roads department, therefore the State, the manager of this part of the highway, will take over to rebuild the roadway.
The causes of the appearance of these cracks have not yet been formally established. Expertises are underway. Strong suspicions weigh on the construction site of the future adjoining Grand Siècle museum, some of which could have caused the retaining wall which carries the motorway and the access road to the Saint-Cloud national domain to move slightly. Last weekend, backfilling work was carried out near this wall, where several cubic meters of earth had been disbursed to create the parking lots and basements of the museum.
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