From the nineteenth -century dream to the epic construction site: as the Mont Blanc tunnel was born, between visions, tragedies and a company that changed Europe
For decades the direct connection between France and Italy (until the nineteenth century Savoy Sabauda) remained an unrealized dream. Too impressive and impenetrable to the technology of two centuries ago it was Mont Blanc, who remained insurmountable guardian on the border until the second post -war period. It was since 1946 that the projects for the tunnel were resumed, this time with the concrete goal of completing the great work, one of the most important for Europe of the twentieth century.
For the creation of the Mont Blanc tunnel, it is very important to the work of Count Dino Lora Totino, engineer and entrepreneur of the Biellese. Passionate about the mountains, he had already distinguished himself for the construction of the cable car of the Pink Plateau in 1939. In the 1950s he will be the promoter of the glaciers’ cable car on Mont Blanc. Visionary and wealthy, the work began at his expense between 1946 and 1949, but with inadequate means that placed more than a doubt about the possibility of success. Only a subsequent agreement between the French and Italian authorities signed in 1949 finally gave the right momentum to the work, which was resumed only in 1959, 10 years after the 250 meters that Count Lora Totino had managed to achieve in almost three years of excavation. The technology of the time involved the use of a special excavator called “Jumbo”, a giant of 10 tons with 16 drills connected to each other on 4 worktops. The progress from the Italian side began first to an average of 9 meters per day. Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 1959, the works also began on the Chamonix side. One million cubic meters of rock constituted the resulting materials of the excavations, carried out with the use of explosives. There was no lack of fatal accidents: the final balance of the work claimed the life of 23 workers and two alpine guides, dispersed during the triangulation and detection work.
During the excavation works, more difficult on the Italian side due to the presence of great water infiltrations, a sort of competition between Italians and French was established, with the latter who repeatedly affirmed the security of reaching first at the end of the 5,800 meters assigned to them. So it was that the Italian works manager Julius Cesare Meschini reorganized the shifts, making them continuous and doubling the workers’ wages. In the end, he had reason when on August 3, 1962 the Italian “tube” was finished, in advance of 11 days on colleagues from the Alps. It took another three years to make the tunnel passable, which was ready to be inaugurated on July 16, 1965 in the presence of the presidents Giuseppe Saragat and Charles de Gaulle. It will be open to traffic three days later, on July 19th. The tunnel worked uninterruptedly until the tragic accident of March 24, 1999 when a truck entered with an engine to the engine and took fire in the heart of the mountain, causing a massacre in which 39 people lost their lives. From the accident, the tunnel remained closed until 2002, a period in which it was affected by a complete modernization especially in the aspects of safety.
