Anger grows over bridge collapse as death toll rises
TWO more bodies have been pulled out of tonnes of rubble after a bridge collapsed in Genoa, raising the death toll in the disaster to at least 39 people.
The collapse of the Morandi Bridge sent dozens of cars and three trucks plunging as far as 150ft to the ground.
Many Italian families were on the road ahead of yesterday’s major summer holiday, Ferragosto.
Civil protection authorities confirmed 39 people died and 15 were injured. Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said three children were among the dead.
Rescuers and sniffer dogs are continuing to search through tonnes of concrete slabs and steel for survivors or bodies.
Investigators are also working to determine what caused a 260ft-long stretch of highway to break off from the 150ft-high bridge in the northwestern port city.
Italian politicians, for their part, are trying to find who to blame for the tragedy.
The 1967 bridge, considered innovative in its time for its use of concrete around its cables, had long been due for an upgrade, especially since the structure saw more heavy traffic than its designers had envisioned.
One expert in such construction, Antonio Brencich, at the University of Genoa, had previously called the bridge “a failure of engineering”.
An unidentified woman who was standing below the bridge told RAI state TV that the structure crumbled as if it were a mound of baking flour.
Engineering experts, noting that the bridge was 51 years old, said corrosion and weather could have been factors in its collapse.
The Italian CNR civil engineering society said structures dating from when the Morandi Bridge was built had surpassed their lifespan.
It called for a “Marshall Plan” to repair or replace tens of thousands of Italian bridges and viaducts built in the 1950s and 1960s, adding that simply updating or reinforcing the bridges would be more expensive than destroying and rebuilding them with new technology.
Mehdi Kashani, an associate professor in structural mechanics at the University of Southampton in the UK, said pressure from dynamic loads, such as heavy traffic or wind, could have resulted in “fatigue damage” in the bridge’s parts.
Italy’s Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure, Danilo Toninelli, said there was a plan pending to spend €20m (£15.7m) on bids for significant safety work on the bridge.
Mr Toninelli, from the populist 5-Star Movement, threatened in a Facebook post that the state, if necessary, would take direct control of the highways agency if it could not properly care for roads and bridges.
In 2013, some 5-Star MPs had questioned the wisdom of an ambitious and expensive infrastructure overhaul programme as possibly wasteful, according to reports, but a post about that on the Movement’s site was removed on Tuesday after the bridge’s collapse.
Within hours of the collapse, Mr Salvini was vowing not to let European Union spending strictures on Italy, which is laden with public debt, stop any effort to make the country’s infrastructure safe.
Genoa is a flood-prone city, and officials have warned that the debris from the collapse must be removed as soon as possible after some of the wreckage landed in a dry riverbed.