Italy bridge death toll cut to 38

Rescuers continue to search through rubble for missing

GENOA, Italy — The death toll from the collapse of a highway bridge in the Italian city of Genoa that is already confirmed to have claimed at least 38 lives will certainly rise, a senior official said Thursday.

“Unfortunately, the toll will increase, that’s inevitable” as rescuers continued to search tons of rubble for the missing, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini told reporters.

On Wednesday, Premier Giuseppe Conte told reporters that 39 people had died.

But on Thursday, the Genoa’s prefect office, which reports to the interior ministry lowered the number of confirmed dead to 38. Prefect Office official Raffaella Corsaro attributed the lowered number to a “misunderstanding” about information supplied by ambulance dispatchers.

Corsaro said that there are 15 injured persons. Doctors have said one of the injured is in coma with severe cranial injuries.

Rescuers continued to comb through tons of jagged steel, concrete and dozens of vehicles that plunged as much as 150 feet into a dry river bed on Tuesday, the eve of Italy’s main summer holiday.

Salvini declined to cite a number of the missing, saying that would be “supposition,” but separately Genoa Chief Prosecutor Francesco Cozzi told reporters there could be between 10 and 20 people still unaccounted for.

Gov. Giovanni Toti, the leader of the Liguria region which includes Genoa, told a news conference that a key part of the problem in calculating how many might be missing is that “we don’t know how many cars, how many trucks were on the bridge at that moment” when it collapsed during a violent rainstorm.

“The search and rescue operations will continue until we find all those people that are listed as missing,” Sonia Noci, a spokeswoman for Genoa firefighters, told The Associated Press.

Italy is planning a state funeral for the dead in the port city Saturday, which will be marked as a day of national mourning. The service will be held in a pavilion on the industrial city’s fair grounds and led by Genoa’s archbishop, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco.