Romanian trucker becomes Genoa bridge’s 43rd victim

● Infrastructure company says bridge can be rebuilt in eight months

A Genoa hospital says a Romanian truck driver who suffered severe cranial and chest injuries in the city’s bridge collapse has died.

San Martino Hospital has said that Marian Rosca, 36, died on Saturday evening. Doctors had described him as the most severely injured of the survivors of Tuesday’s collapse of the Morandi Bridge, a key artery in Genoa.

His death raises to 43 the number of people who died when the Morandi Bridge collapsed, sending its highway, bridge support tower and dozens of cars and trucks plunging 45 metres into a dry riverbed in the northern Italian port city.

Authorities say several other bridge survivors are still hospitalised.

The Italian highway company in charge of the collapsed bridge has said it can build a new bridge in eight months.

Giovanni Castellucci, CEO of Autostrade per l’Italia, the company that manages and upkeeps Italian highways and bridges, told reporters Saturday it planned to demolish what was left of the largely concrete 51year-old Morandi Bridge and build a “less imposing” steel one.

Italy’s government has begun procedures to revoke the company’s concession and has vowed that Autostrade per l’Italia will never again run the nation’s roads.

Castellucci declined to talk about the government’s stance. He said that even though the cause of Tuesday’s bridge collapse had not been determined, “we apologize” since “perceptions count.”

Castellucci also said the company would provide funds to help the hundreds of people evacuated from apartment buildings in the shadow of the bridge.

But the Italy’s new populist government quickly spurned both the offer of help and the apology.

“Let’s be very clear, the state won’t take charity from Autostrade,” Deputy Premier Luigi Di Maio, who attended the funeral, said in a Facebook post. “We’ll insist on credible reimbursement, and there won’t be any bartering. The only road the government will follow is that of going forward with revocation procedures.”

Prosecutors are focusing on possible design flaws or improper maintenance as an eventual cause for the disaster.

On Saturday evening, Italian President Sergio Mattarella demanded guarantees that all the nation’s roads were safe following the tragedy, after hugging and comforting mourners at a state funeral in the grieving port city.

Mattarella spoke quietly to victims’ families before the ceremony began on Genoa’s fairgrounds. Usually reserved in demeanor, Mattarella was embraced tightly for a long moment by one distraught woman.

He then took his place with other Italian leaders, including Premier Giuseppe Conte and the transport minister, in the packed yet cavernous hall.

Afterwards, Mattarella called the funeral, which took place on a day of national mourning, “a moment of grief, shared grief, by all of Italy.”

One mourner, a local man who would only give his first name, Alessandro, held a placard that read: “In Italy, we prefer ribboncuttings to maintenance” – referring to the country’s dilapidated infrastructure.

“These are mistakes that keep on repeating themselves. And now, for the umpteenth time, angels have flown into heaven and paid for the mistakes of other human beings,” Alessandro said.

As the city honoured its dead, the toll from Tuesday’s bridge collapse rose unofficially Saturday to 43 with the discovery of four more bodies in the rubble and the death in the hospital of the most severely injured survivor.

Firefighter Stefano Zanut told Sky TG24 TV they had extracted from tons of broken concrete the crushed car that an Italian couple on vacation with their nine-year-old daughter had been traveling in.

Zanut said the last body pulled out of the wreckage was that of a young Italian man, an employee of Genoa’s trash company, who was working under the bridge when it collapsed. The man’s mother had refused to leave a tent set up a few hundred yards away from the rubble until his body was found.

RAI state radio have said authorities now believe there are no more missing in the tragedy.

The families of 19 victims gathered in the hall for the funeral Mass led by Genoa’s archbishop, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, who said the tragedy had “gashed the heart of Genoa.”

“The initial disbelief and then the growing dimension of the catastrophe, the general bewilderment, the tumult of emotions, the pressing ‘Whys?’ have touched us yet again and in a brutal way show the inexorable fragility of the human condition,” he said.

Among the coffins were those of two young Albanian Muslim men who lived and worked in Italy. Their remains were blessed at the end of the Catholic service by a Genoa imam, who drew applause when he prayed for God to “protect Italy and all Italians.”

Players and managers from the city’s two major league soccer teams, Genoa and Sampdoria, also attended after their weekend matches were postponed out of respect for the dead.