Europe: Under the Alps

A mighty blast echoed deep inside towering Mont Blanc (alt. 15.781 ft.) last week, and a thick wall of rock crumbled in a dense cloud of smoke and dust. A mile and a half down in the Alpine depths, tunnel workers from Italy and from France scrambled over the settling debris to meet in grimy embrace and exchange flags, helmets and undershirts. They cheered hoarsely: “Viva la Francia!” “Vive I’Italic!” Waterfalls & Soft Rock. It was the breakthrough for the world’s longest vehicular tunnel, stretching 7.2 miles* beneath the icy, forbidding Alpine massif to join Courmayeur, Italy, and Chamonix, France, the famed ski resort. A magnificent feat of engineering, the French and Italian sections of the horizontal hole, begun on opposite sides of Western Europe’s tallest mountain, were only two inches out of line horizontally and three inches off vertically when they came together. After 3½ years of toil and tragedy —including 17 deaths, 800 injuries—the tunnel was a handsome triumph over monumental hazards. The Italians began in January 1959, eight months before the French, but soon lost the advantage of their head start, for the glacier-squeezed southern Alpine rock was dangerously brittle, collapsed regularly, requiring extra bracing for the tunnel roof; cascades of underground water often streamed into the tunnel, almost drowning drillers under subterranean waterfalls. The French, plagued by fewer engineering difficulties but disrupted by three months of labor strikes, hinted darkly that the Italians got to the halfway mark first by drilling a narrower tunnel in the final weeks. The Italians insisted they had done so only because of crumbling rock; the Rome press was quick to claim victory in the tunneling contest.

Wine & a Chorus. After the last rock barrier fell last week, the weary tunnel diggers joined high officials and journalists in a gala celebration over a huge buffet of salami, ham rolls, petits fours, 200 bottles of French champagne and 450 bottles of Italian wine. High and happy, one French worker improvised a dance with an Italian driller who poured wine and mineral water over him as others sang and clanked empty bottles in accompaniment.

European travelers and businessmen should be happy too. The $50 million Mont Blanc tunnel will represent a big advance in European transport when it is opened to traffic early in 1964. The 23-ft., two-lane roadway will chop 125 mountainous miles from the Paris-Rome drive, open a route usable even when Alpine snow is deepest; Geneva and Turin. 197 miles apart by road in the summer and 491 miles apart in the winter, will be separated by 168 miles all year long when the tunnel is opened.

Looking back on the grueling work and tragic loss of life, Italian Operations Chief Loris Corbi spoke for his half of the vast Franco-Italian project: “This event is like a chorus, now sad, then happy, sometimes soft and sometimes loud, sung by all the people of Italy for all the people of Europe.”

*— Runners-up: Britain’s Mersey Tunnel joining Liverpool and Birkenhead (1934), Japan’s Kan-mon Tunnel between the islands of Honshu and Kyushu (1958), both slightly over two miles long.