On This Day: Mont Blanc road tunnel opens under Europe’s highest mountain

JULY 16, 1965: The Mont Blanc Tunnel opened beneath Europe’s highest mountain and provided a quick road link through the Alps between France and Italy on this day in 1965.

The 7.2-mile-long passage, which took eight years to complete, was then the world’s longest road tunnel - triple the length of anything constructed before.

By enabling motorists to bypass narrow, winding mountain passes that were often closed by snow, it massively slashed journey times.

The drive between Chamonix, France and Courmayeur, Italy – the two openings of the tunnel – was cut by two and a half hours.

And it reduced the driving distance from Paris to Rome by 300 miles, while also improving connections with Italy’s industrial powerhouse cities, Turin and Milan.

The roadway, which required a tunnel-boring machine and 784 tons of explosives to clear 19.6million cubic feet of rock, was opened by French President Charles de Gaulle and Italy’s Giuseppe Saragat.

A British Pathé newsreel shows the two statesmen each cutting a ribbon on the French side before taking the first official drive through the toll tunnel.

The £500million link, which replaced Liverpool’s Mersey Tunnel as the world’s longest, was also financed by nearby Switzerland as it too benefited economically.

It was designed to be used by 300,000 vehicles annually, yet by the 1990s more than 2million travelled through it, including half of all lorries going from France to Italy.

This posed huge new risks to the tunnel, which opens at 4,091ft on the French side and at 4,530ft on the Italian side.

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In 1999, the passageway was closed for three years after 39 people died when a truck carrying flour and margarine burst into flames in the middle.

The fire spread and the resulting inferno burned at 1,000C, which was so hot that it melted the road surface and caused tyres to pop on cars near the entrance.

Even the fireproof shelters that were built in 1990 could not withstand the heat.

More people would have died if heroic security guard Pierlucio Tinazzi had not evacuated 10 survivors on his motorcycle – and perished in the process.

The tunnel, which took days to cool down before debris could be removed, was reopened in 2002 after £300million was spent on reconstruction and safety upgrades.

No major accidents have happened since and it remains significantly safer than the 15,781ft peak above it, which is also known as Monte Bianco, meaning ‘white mountain’ in Italian.

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Up to 100 climbers die every year attempting to reach its icy summit and almost 8,000 have been killed since records began

This makes it by far the deadliest mountain in terms of the total number of deaths, although this is largely because more people have tried to scale it.

The glacier, which is also known as Death Mountain or the White Killer, packs its biggest punch in the form of awesome avalanches.

In 2012, nine climbers – including three Britons - were swept to the deaths by a 500ft-wide wall of snow.

The tunnel below it, which now costs €41 (£32.70) for cars and €300 (£239) for lorries to use, remains one of the most important arteries in Europe.

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Yet there are now several other subterranean roads in the Alps - three of which, the St Gotthard, Arlberg and Frejus, are bigger – and the Mont Blanc is only the 11th longest in the world today.

The record holder is now the 15.2-mile Laerdal in Norway, while China alone has built five of the top ten since 2007.