When transparency is lacking and instead of explaining, an attempt is made to detect (“nothing tells us that the ground subsidence is due to the tram works” – claims the president of the Metropolis), can we be surprised that people question, doubt, and even disbelieve what they are told?
About fifty residents gathered today with opposition elected officials Dominique Boy Mottard, Marc Concas, Patrick Allemand, Benoît Kandel, Guillaume Aral, the Nice-based geologist Eric Gilli, and former elected official Marie Luz Hernandez Nicaise at a café on Boulevard Victor Hugo to try to understand what is happening, if the subsidence of the threshold and the cracks here and there are just minor accidents on a construction site of this size or premonitions of something much more serious.
And this despite the local newspaper’s advice to take an example from Rennes where the construction of the tramway posed far more problems, they say, yet people display a serene tranquility! Ah, those Breton people!
Doubts remain, and the residents are a bit panicked between the highly technical explanations from Professor Gilli, who has played with a certain pleasure the role of Cassandra since the beginning with his “lectio magistralis,” delivering worrying messages to property owners who, given the average age, simply want to live peacefully, and the warnings from the outspoken president of the collective who has always opposed the tunnel passage, Madam Josiane Pastorel, who shouts “we are not fooled” and accuses the town hall of “omerta.”
In short, it would be good for the Metropolis to understand that the monthly press conferences with smiling deputies are not the most appropriate response.
The project director indirectly intervened in the debate in the afternoon by providing useful clarifications: “There is a sewer line in the middle that is visibly broken and needs to be repaired. It’s a major repair that will take a few weeks.”
Couldn’t it have been said earlier? Was it a state secret?
Regarding the continuation of operations, he remains optimistic: “The terrain presents fewer risks in those areas.”
