Province Approves Tunnel Repairs, Construction to Begin by February End

Dellai has signed off, the paperwork is in order. Yesterday afternoon, the project was reviewed by the provincial technical committee and the conference of services for opinions and any necessary prescriptions.

Within eight days, the province will choose the company that will carry out the excavation of the tunnel between Riva and Sperone; by the end of the month, between February 20 and 25, the work on the tunnel is set to begin. By the end of July, the new tunnel route of Gardesana will be passable, provisionally, while waiting to resume and finalize everything during the upcoming winter.

Decisions and interventions on the tunnel

The decision of the council is official, announced by the president himself, who appeared visibly satisfied with the demonstrated efficiency of the provincial apparatus in facing the emergency. The total expenditure borne by the Province has been quantified at 75 billion lira, 28 billion of which are allocated to “urgent works,” with the remaining 45 billion (approximately) for finishing interventions that will follow the standard procurement process.

Regarding the tunnel, given the urgency caused by the dangerous state of the road, the province will assign the work through a simplified tender process, to which eight Trentino companies have been invited. These companies meet the required qualifications for this type of work and had already been contacted informally in recent days when engineer De Col and the provincial technicians responsible for the sector drafted and evaluated the feasibility of the project.

Each of the eight companies assured that they are capable of respecting the prescribed timeline: namely, to make the tunnel passable by the end of next July. This type of decision ends the debate: possibilities for a partial and provisional transit are now eliminated.

Even if the tunnel is made passable, only construction site vehicles will pass along the old route: the remediation of the rocky wall, which cost 4 billion lira, already allocated in spring of last year, is only intended to provide minimal safety conditions for trucks that will shuttle between the service tunnel (150 meters long, perpendicular to the Riva-Limone route, built to allow excavation on four fronts) and the inert debris deposit.

Technically — but this is of little interest to the public — the 1200-meter-long 45 bis tunnel is classified among the emergency measures following the recent months’ flood events of last year.