Since the early hours of Thursday, Dec. 21, a new viaduct has been welcoming travelers coming from Rome or the A25 highway onto the main access to the city of L’Aquila. A crucial infrastructure for tourists, students and workers who are spending the Christmas season in the Abruzzo capital.
This is the busiest ramp at the interchange that, bypassing Via dei Medici, provides access to the L’Aquila Ovest toll booth. It was rebuilt on five corten steel spans resting on four cylindrical pylons, also in corten, filled with self-compacting concrete and equipped with state-of-the-art seismic dissipators.
The smaller temporary ramp, which had been built as a temporary bypass to avoid closing this vital artery during construction, ceased service and passed the baton to the new earthquake-proof viaduct Thursday morning.
The new ramp is part of the massive seismic upgrading plan for the entire highway section between the Capoluogo and Tornimparte interchanges. And it joins the new Sant’Onofrio and Genzano viaducts, which have been completed and opened to traffic in both directions, and four other viaducts also nearing completion for the second carriageway.
In fact, between Christmas and New Year, work continued on the new decks of the Le Pastena viaduct and the Aterno viaduct, which will resume in the coming days. These are all works carried out on site, without interrupting vehicular flow, in order to equip the territory with new infrastructure, adapted to the latest earthquake-resistant regulations and capable of safely accompanying travelers on the A24 highway into the next century.
