text: Brussels officials have reportedly blamed " mice " for their inability to tackle chronic traffic jams, saying hungry rodents probably ate the original plans to improve underground tunnels in the Belgian capital. 
   
   As EU leaders convened for a summit to deal with British threats to quit the bloc and to discuss the refugee crisis, they found a city often in gridlock due to repeated closures of key road tunnels caused by crumbling concrete and years of decay. 
   
   Now the Belgian capital's regional parliament has been told that repairs are being held up because original construction plans have apparently eaten by rodents. 
   
   The unlikely claim was made during an investigation into the parlous state of a series of tunnels under Brussels, which are under threat of falling apart. 
   
   A special parliamentary commission has been set up to look into how the 7.1 miles of underground traffic tunnels in Brussels have become so dilapidated and whether it is too late to save them. 
   
   During a hearing this week, Christian De Buysshcher, the former head of roads for the body in charge of the tunnels, was asked: "What happened to the plans of the tunnels when the responsibility was transferred from the federal to the Brussels government?" 
   
   He replied that the original plans were archived in 1989 inside a pier under a viaduct linking the Liège motorway to the boulevard Reyers, as at the time his service did not have any proper offices. 
   
   There they remained for the following 20 years. 
   
   Workers finally got around to moving them to a proper storage room in 2010, after the viaduct was demolished. Unfortunately, however, by then “they were apparently eaten by mice," Mr De Buysscher is cited as saying in Het Nieuwsblad. 
   
   The claim prompted much mirth in Belgium and neighbouring France, with the Sputnik website noting: "Obviously, rodents sneakily devoured the documents so that the streets of the city will never be free of traffic jams." 
   
   It added that, "deprived of plans", the capital will probably be forced to put off resolving the problem for a long time". 
   
   The state of the roads in the city of 1.2 million, home to the European Union and Nato headquarters, has become a hot political issue in Belgium, with an estimated bill of some €1 billion (£777 million) to repair all the tunnels. 
   
   Asked to explain why they were in such a bad way, Mr De Buysscher insisted that "we clearly sounded the alarm" in 2013, pointing out that the repair costs for a 300m stretch was €360 million. 
   
   "I issued several warnings to ministers about the lack of engineers and specialised technicians," he said. 
   
   Jean-Claude Moureau, former head of Brussels Mobility, the body in charge of the tunnels, said that Brussels authorities had always been prompt at agreeing to emergency work in the tunnels but had always "hesitated" when it came to "deeper renovation" due to budgetary constraints and the inevitable traffic chaos such works would create. ||||| Could this be the world’s worst excuse for poor infrastructure? 
   
   The city of Brussels has a novel excuse for recent holdups to vital public works. Faced with Europe’s worst traffic, the Belgian capital has been desperately trying to patch up tunnels whose poor state has caused road closures. Now Brussels has finally explained why the repairs are taking so long: the tunnel’s plans have all been eaten by mice. 
   
   Claiming rodents ate your master plan sounds like the municipal equivalent of saying the dog ate your homework, but apparently it’s true. According to city transit officials, plans for the tunnels were stored inside bridge supports on one of Brussels’ main highways—a bizarre enough fact in itself. They seem to have ended up there because, when the Brussels Capital Region was founded in 1989, the relevant transport department was in temporary digs in a hotel and was short on space. 
   
   It turns out a concrete pillar is not the ideal place to store valuable documents, which have all disappeared, apparently eaten. By now, the tunnel plans have probably long since been chewed to pieces by hungry teeth and passed through a host of murine digestive systems. 
   
   The local response to the news is pretty much what you’d expect: people seem to be pausing occasionally from belly laughs to bang their heads against the wall in frustration. Brussels, you see, is increasingly at risk of looking a bit hopeless. The city’s political structure is insane; it’s covered by 19 completely independent municipalities whose cooperation is made yet more complex by the division of their populations between French and Dutch speakers. Brussels infrastructure is also shoddy, its roads routinely clogged. It’s a tribute to something—citizen resilience? distinctive architecture?—that the city still manages to be as charming and likeable as it is. 
   
   A pleasant, self-deprecating humor is a default response to this dysfunction, as testified to by this spoof plan to give Belgium’s traffic jams UNESCO World Heritage status. Brussels residents are nonetheless all too aware of the damage it does to their reputation. French newspaper Libération caused uproar when it roasted the city’s poor conditions in a major article of 2013, leading to a Brussels pushback that still acknowledged much of the attack was fair. Just two days ago—the day before Mousegate—another local commentator complained that Brussels had become a place defined by “cracked concrete tunnels,” “inextricable traffic jams,” and “the impossibility of moving serenely, without stress.” 
   
   Now on top of all this, it turns out that the city can’t even keep a piece of paper safe. We can all laugh, but when the great minds of a European capital are defeated by a little furry thing with a brain the size of a sugar cube, something has gone seriously awry.
target: – Decaying road tunnels have left Brussels in a perpetual state of traffic chaos, but repairs are apparently on hold due to what CityLab deems possibly "the world's worst excuse for poor infrastructure": hungry rodents. Because the transportation department was housed 25 years ago in a hotel (apparently when the responsibility for the roads passed from federal hands into local ones) and didn't have a lot of space, the original construction blueprints for some of the city's major tunnels were instead filed away in the pillars under a highway bridge, Reuters reports. Apparently the four-legged creatures got to them before their two-legged counterparts. The Telegraph reports the plans were stored in that less-than-ideal location for two decades, and were moved to a typical storage facility in 2010. But by then "they were apparently eaten by mice," the ex-chief of Brussels' infrastructure department informed city officials on Wednesday. (Well, they do say city mice are smarter than country mice.)