The National Motorway that has sinned aplenty…

The long lines and the after-midnight Clean Monday "celebrations" on the Athens-Lamia motorway are taking the Infrastructure ministry and Nea Odos, the contractor of the Skarfia-Fthiotida section, to the trenches.

Clean Monday which turned into Good Monday for thousands of holidaymakers due to an expected snowfall is scratching the bleeding wounds of the motorway and sending messages of a full frontal collision between contractors and the ministry in a period of tough negotiations for the concession contracts.

It was the icing on the cake for the long-suffering road that has preoccupied the news many times about tolls inside Athens, unauthorised structures, unfinished works and increases in fees, which gave birth to the movement against tolls.

This is why the subject of the negotiations with the government are the trade-offs that will be offered to the company so it won’t operate any new stations inside Attica.

They “cleared” the fines

Infrastructure minister Dimitris Reppas moved on the counterattack yesterday, ascribing all the blame for the Monday mess to the consortium of the GEK-Terna and Spanish Dragados-Ferovial companies.

But it’s not even been a month since, by meams of a legislative initiative, he exempted the company from fines due to urban planning breaches of 22 mil euros for the buildings and the stations at Afidnes, Kapandriti and Malakasa, which the urban planning office of Kapandriti had imposed after a series of decisions.

For over a year now, a complaint report from bodies and citizens of NE Attica has been sitting around in the office of the minister, who has also been forwarded to the Prosecutor of Arios Pagos Ioannis Tentes, for omissions and long delays in the motorway projects. Among the accusations is the delay in the installation of five Maintenance Control Centers, which according to aircraft builder Takis Kouris, should have been built in August 2009 and relate to the entire material and technical infrastructure for clearing the road in special circumstances like last Monday.

It’s the drivers’ fault

Nea Odos is upholding its handling of the situation and puts the blame for the suffering of thousands of drivers on the nonexistent traffic police, traffic problems created by the diversion of large trucks and the Greeks habit of occupying the emergency lane to put on tyre chains.

They even argue that the operational plan for the measures they will take in case of extreme weather phenomena has been submitted to the ministry since last November.

As for the works, they stress that the only pending issue is the expropriation of a lot in the area of Iliki, which has been delayed due to the refusal of the owner to deliver it.

What really happened on the «sinful» road cannot be fathomed even by the drivers themselves. None of them saw the 50 snow plows that Nea Odos argues had been clearing the motorway since noon on Monday.

On the contrary, they all went through a horrible return that enraged many of the drivers and forced Reppas to send the case to the Prosecutor and the Inspector of Public Administration.

The only “positive” event of those days was the landslide at Tempi which, luckily for the ministry and the contractor (Aegean Motorway), only led to a passing driver being injured.