IN PICTURES – The general public discovers the PC Routes of the Loire-Atlantique department

The public is invited to discover the PC Routes of the Loire-Atlantique department, this Wednesday and Thursday. The organized tours are already full. The Roads PC is the command post responsible for monitoring the 4,300 kilometers of departmental roads. It is located in a building, rue Sully, in Nantes. Operators monitor the Saint-Nazaire bridge in particular thanks to 29 cameras installed on site. In the room, there is a giant screen on which video surveillance images are broadcast in real time. This is the only place where cameras are installed, for the departmental roads of Loire-Atlantique.

On all other routes this is done by telephone. Motorists, gendarmes, police officers or agents on the ground notify the Roads PC in the event of major slowdowns. It is the operators who then trigger an intervention in the event of an accident. On a daily basis, PC Routes operators open and close the lanes in both directions on the Saint-Nazaire bridge, depending on traffic.

A visit open to the public

This Wednesday afternoon, two operators out of the eight at PC Routes explained their job to several groups of visitors. They welcomed the public into this room with large screens where the telephone never stopped ringing. It is from behind a computer that the operators manage the openings and closings of the lanes of the Saint-Nazaire bridge. A delicate job since there is 33,000 passages per day on the Saint-Nazaire bridge, on average. That's 40,000 during peak periods during the summer. In the event of an accident on the bridge, “we put emergency mode in place. At that point, I can only neutralize part of the bridge. But in the majority of cases, we neutralize the entire track and we bring in a team as quickly as possible”explains Lotfi Charaabi, an operator.

And this work is complicated during strong weather episodes. Like during the Caetano storm. There were five agents and not two at that time. A reinforced team which received 850 calls. “People are going to be informed a lot more, so we have a lot of calls. And then, we have to continue to monitor the Saint-Nazaire bridge at the same time. Afterwards, we anticipate. Météo-France alerts us in advance , so we have the capacity to adapt our organization according to the announced phenomenon”says Pascal Fromentin, head of the user information service.

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