At least 26 killed after Italian bridge collapses
‘Immense tragedy’ hits Italian city on eve of holiday
AT least 26 people are reported to have been killed after a large section of a motorway bridge collapsed onto buildings in the north Italian port city of Genoa.
Officials in Liguria updated the toll on Twitter last night, confirming two more bodies had been extracted and one person had died in surgery. That brings to 15 the number of injured.
Up to 100 metres of the motorway collapsed at around 11.30am local time during torrential rainfall after Genoa was hit by a strong thunderstorm.
Witnesses said the Morandi bridge was hit by a bolt of lightning. One said he saw “eight or nine” vehicles on the bridge when it collapsed in what he said was an “apocalyptic scene”.
ANOTHER four metres and he would have been dead.
Antonio Rubino slammed on the brakes of his car just short of the point at which the bridge in Genoa collapsed.
A few seconds later and he would have plunged into the void – as did all the cars and trucks in front of him.
He was one of several drivers to cheat death yesterday when the Morandi bridge collapsed during a heavy thunderstorm and torrential rain.
“I was the last car behind those who died,” said Mr Rubino. “In front of me the asphalt just completely collapsed. I’m alive by a miracle. Luckily, I was not shunted from behind, otherwise I would have gone down with the others. I was three, maybe four metres from the abyss. There was total panic. People got out of the cars and ran.”
The driver of a supermarket delivery van also reacted in time, screeching to a halt just short of the 45m drop.
The driver was in deep shock, said Giovanni D’Alessandro, the director general of supermarket chain Basko. “He’s OK but he’s in shock. It’s a stretch of road that our vans use every day. There’s heavy traffic and often you can’t drive very fast. Perhaps that’s why the driver had time to brake.”
At least 26 people, including a child, died in the collapse of the motorway bridge, with up to 35 cars and five to 10 trucks plummeting to the ground.
Officials in Liguria updated the toll on Twitter late last night, confirming two more bodies had been extracted and one person had died in surgery. That brings to 15 the number of injured.
Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte visited the city and called the collapse “a serious wound for Genoa, Liguria and Italy.”
Danilo Toninelli, the transport minister, earlier said in a tweet that he was “following with great apprehension what seems like an immense tragedy”.
Nearly 300 firefighters and rescue workers battled into the night to find survivors beneath giant mounds of concrete debris and twisted steel girders. They used sniffer dogs to detect any signs of life in scenes familiar from the deadly earthquakes that have hit Italy in the last few years.
“We’re not giving up hope, we’ve already saved a dozen people from under the rubble,” said Emanuele Giffi, a fire service official. “We’re going to work round the clock until the last victim is found.”
As dusk fell, the emergency services installed large spotlights to illuminate the wreckage. “We’re trying to get two people out of a car. They’re still alive,” said a firefighter from
Tuscany who stepped out of the rubble for a bottle of water and a brief reprieve from the sound of helicopter rotor blades, ambulance sirens, barking search dogs and humming generators.
The relatives of people feared to have died in the disaster gathered at a Red Cross tent for counselling.
“They are simply waiting, so we are trying to give them the support they need,” said a psychologist.
Survivors were winched to safety by helicopters and flown to hospitals, while four people were pulled alive from vehicles buried under the rubble.
The 650ft-long section of the Morandi bridge collapsed during an intense thunderstorm which brought torrential rain.
“First the central pylon crumbled, then the whole thing came down,” said Davide Ricci, who was driving when the bridge came down. “The debris... came to within 20m of my car.”
Angelo Borrelli, the head of Italy’s civil protection agency, said that the exact number of dead and injured had yet to be established. “You can see there are very big portions of the bridge [that collapsed]. We need to remove all of the rubble to ascertain that all of the people have been reached. Operations are ongoing to extract people imprisoned below parts of the bridge and twisted metal.”
The disaster happened as millions of Italians headed to the coast to celebrate a national holiday known as Ferragosto today, traditionally the height of the summer tourist season.
Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, the head of the hard-right League party as well as interior minister, said those responsible for the collapse would be held to account.
He said he wanted the “names and surnames of those to blame”.