BRITONS’ TERROR ON DEATH BRIDGE
Family tell how road buckled – as the mafia is linked to the horror collapse that killed 39
A BRITISH family last night told of their terror as they drove on the Morandi Bridge and the road ahead of them began twisting and buckling. Nicola and Lisa Henton- Mitchell described how their hire car began sliding to the right in torrential rain before they encountered a wall of brake lights.
Some vehicles suddenly began reversing and others were abandoned as drivers and passengers jumped out to run for their lives.
The couple and their two children fled their car and ran back down the bridge to a tunnel, where they took shelter with dozens of other shocked and drenched families.
They told of their ordeal as the death toll from the Morandi Bridge disaster rose to 39 and it was revealed that Italy’s governing party had dismissed fears over the state of the bridge as a fairy tale.
Grief turned to anger as experts said the collapse was inevitable because of design flaws and decades of slap- dash repairs. There were claims that the structure had been built on the cheap by cowboy firms run by the mafia.
Yesterday Lisa Henton-Mitchell told the BBC: ‘I was driving. The rain was so severe you could only see a few cars in front of you. Something didn’t feel right. We felt we were sliding to the right.
‘Everyone’s red lights came on. Then, it seemed like seconds later, the reverse lights came on. The car in front reversed and crashed into us.’
Her partner said: ‘When we ran from the car my daughter didn’t have her shoes on. My son grabbed a rucksack with a few bits in. Fortunately it had our passports and a phone. Everyone just ran into the tunnel. When we got there, everybody was crying, distraught.’
Soaked from the torrential rain, the family found it difficult to communicate with the other survivors. They eventually found a Belgian couple who translated a rumour that the bridge had collapsed.
Police started interviewing survivors and helping them recover their abandoned vehicles and a bus took them to a civic centre in Genoa where they were given water, clothes and blankets.
The couple from Bicester, Oxfordshire, were four days into a three-week holiday. They had stopped at a rest area shortly before reaching the bridge. ‘We had stopped to use the toilet. Thank God, or it could have been worse,’ said Lisa. In front of the British family was a 37-year- old truck driver who managed to stop just short of the collapse. The driver, indentified only as a father with the initials FL, was returning from a round of grocery deliveries.
‘I saw the road collapsing, with all the cars that I had in front of me,’ he told rescuers. After stopping his truck the man leapt out of his cab and ran to safety. He is being treated for shock.
As the tragic stories of the disaster’s victims began to emerge yesterday, Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte declared a 12month state of emergency covering the region around Genoa.
Autostrade per l’Italia – the company responsible for maintaining the bridge – was said to be planning an extraordinary board meeting next week. However, the company’s two top officials were resisting government calls to quit.
Concerns over the bridge have long been down-played by politicians desperate to avoid the exorbitant cost of repairing it. In a post on its website in 2013, Italy’s Five Star Movement – M5S – described concerns over the imminent collapse of the bridge as a ‘favoletta,’ or children’s fairy story, and the requested repair work as a ‘waste of money.’
The statement was deleted yesterday, just as Mr Conte vowed to undertake a mass audit of the tens of thousands of ageing bridges and viaducts in Italy. ‘We must not allow another tragedy like this to happen,’ he said.
Interior minister Matteo Salvini accused Autostrade of misspending the ‘ billions’ it made from tolls. He said the privately-operated company had ‘not spent the money the way they were supposed to’ and called on its highlypaid executives to step down.
Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into possible negligent homicide. As well as the criminal investigation, Autostrade faces the prospect of a 150million euro (£133million) fine for breach of contract.
Adding to the pressure on the firm is a new picture exposing the dilapidated state of the 80m stretch of the bridge which collapsed. Allegedly taken a few days before the tragedy, it appears to show the bridge buckled, with loose cables hanging off its side.
The structure, which opened in 1967, had been plagued by decades of serious maintenance issues.
Engineers said it would have been cheaper to build a new bridge than to repair it after problems including weak foundations and corroded cables.
Demolition was suggested in 2009 after repair work in the 1990s started to show signs of deterioration. Further repairs started in 2016 and were still going on when the bridge fell.
The disaster is latest in a series of bridge collapses in Italy where economic stagnation has meant infrastructure has become
‘Everybody was crying’ ‘An engineering failure’
increasingly decrepit. The CNR civil engineering society is calling for a major investment programme to repair or replace bridges, many of which were built in the 1950s and 60s, at a time when the mafia was heavily infiltrated in the cement and construction industries.
It was notorious for securing lucrative construction contracts and then cutting corners.
Agathoklis Giaralis, of the University of London’s civil engineering structures research centre, said: ‘ For such a bridge to collapse it has to be something serious. I would say that most probably something went wrong with the foundation or supporting ground.’
In 2016, Antonio Brencich, a professor of engineering at the University of Genoa warned of issues with the bridge being uneven and ‘semi-horizontal.’ Calling the bridge an ‘ engineering failure,’ he added: ‘Sooner or later it will have to be replaced.’
One Genoa resident said. ‘It’s been a lifetime that we’ve known there were problems.’
Fire brigade spokesman Luca Cari yesterday said 400 firefighters had worked through the night to search for survivors. ‘We’re not giving up hope,’ fire official Emanuele Giffi added.
Autostrade insisted it had carried out regular checks on the bridge and that these had provided reassuring results.