Volunteers maintain the walkways of Omaha

In its edition of September 21, 2012, La Renaissance du Bessin reports a day of maintenance of the Omaha walkways, organized on Sunday of Heritage Days on the initiative of Deep Respect with the Gateways of Omaha. About twenty French, English, Dutch and Icelandic volunteers worked with a brush and brush. Veteran Eric L. J. Rackham accompanied them, especially for painting the 3,000 bolts.

The article places these bridges in the history of the artificial port of 1944. It describes dikes consisting of sunken cargo ships and concrete boxes, as well as Whale floating roads connecting the beach to the docks. After the destruction of the facilities by a storm, barges, self-propelled pontoons and amphibious trucks provided the shuttle between the cargo ships and the shore. The newspaper attributes to the traffic of certain days of the summer more than 24,000 people, 3,500 vehicles and 15,000 tons of supplies. He mentions all the port operations over the six months of 1944.

Michel Brissard had found walkways in the Equipment's depots. Their transfer was accompanied by conditions: not to sell them or scrap them, and to put them on the market in the municipality where they had served. He had organized their return by exceptional convoys to reconstitute on land a portion of the floating roads, near the remains of fortifications and memorials.

A member of the association regretted the low participation of the inhabitants of Vierville and the surrounding area and invited them to join these friendly construction sites. Other maintenance days were to be scheduled, and the general meeting was announced for Saturday, December 1. The published contact was President Marie-Christine Costy, at 02 50 27 91 01. An archive photograph showed the construction site of the west footbridge on June 17, 1944.

Reconstructed or uncertain passages:
- The original text brings together the duration of landing operations on the beach and that of the artificial port; the rewriting distinguishes six-month operations from the previous destruction of the facilities by the storm, without adding a date absent from the source.
- Traffic figures are assigned to the journal; they do not constitute an independent historical check.

Archive image: https://vierville.cordelle.eu/PhDoc15/2012sept16-PasserellesNettL.jpg