“It sucks”: the Tivoli bridge broke down on Thursday evening in Sète

Le pont est resté bloqué près d’une heure dans cette position. Midi Libre – Kelman Marti

On Thursday evening, at 7pm, the Tivoli bridge at the entrance to Sète coming from Frontignan broke down, while it was raised. Traffic for cars and pedestrians finally resumed almost an hour later, when the metal building was able to come down.

In the normally well-oiled waltz of bridge openings, the Tivoli bridge missed its reception this Thursday evening. At 6:50 p.m., as every evening, the latter rose normally to allow the navigation of a few boats. But at the first sound signal announcing its descent, nothing happened. The metal structure does not move an iota. The reason ? A piece of equipment on the bridge is faulty.

"The bridge is out of order, please wait"

But pedestrians, cyclists and motorists, who are unaware of this, question themselves, remain in incomprehension, while the wait becomes abnormal.

Then, the minutes pass, until a bridge employee finally gives a first element of response to Speaker Help: “The bridge is down, please wait.”

“It sucks! I just want to go home to Montpellier”,Quentin immediately gets annoyed in the traffic jam. After half an hour of waiting, the first pedestrians and motorists take the gamble of turning around, then a detour, either by the Pont de la Victoire or by the Pont de la Gare.

The breakdown resolved after an hour

On the other side of the Tivoli, Gauthier arrived recently and does not suspect the slightest problem: “I've been waiting for 10 minutes. Okay, I'm going to change my route, that's how it is.” On the road, a few meters away from him, Michèle and her grandson Johan wait patiently in their convertible, while the stifling temperature gradually drops.

“We've been here for 30 minutes, I still have hope that it will start working again,” the grandmother says, as her phone displays 7:45 p.m. A successful bet, since about 10 minutes later, the Tivoli finally managed to come down to the great pleasure of those who had been patient. “The teams of technicians intervened and carried out a degraded repair, that is to say manually, explained the Region on Friday. Today, the malfunction is still being repaired, without it having any impact on the use of the bridge.”