At least 22 people were killed when a motorway bridge collapsed in torrential rains on Tuesday morning over buildings in the northern Italian port city of Genoa, and the deputy transport minister said the death toll would rise.
An 80-meter section of the bridge, including one set of the supports that tower above it, crashed down in the rain onto the roof of a factory and other buildings, crushing at least one truck and plunging huge slabs of concrete into the river below.
“It’s not acceptable that such an important bridge… was not built to avoid this kind of collapse,” Deputy Transport Minister Edoardo Rixi said on SkyNews24, speaking from Genoa.
He said the collapse had killed at least 22 people but the number of dead would climb.
Helicopter footage on social media showed trucks and cars stranded on either side of the 50-metre high collapsed section of the Morandi Bridge, which was built on the A10 toll motorway in the 1960s. One truck was shown just meters away from the broken end of the bridge.
Restructuring work on the 1.2 km-long bridge, a major artery to the Italian Riviera and to France’s southern coast, was carried out in 2016. The highway operator said work to shore up its foundation was being carried out at the time of the collapse, adding that the bridge was constantly monitored.
A witness told Sky Italia television he saw “eight or nine” vehicles on the bridge when it collapsed in what he said was an “apocalyptic scene”.
Some 200 firefighters were on the scene, the fire service said, and Italian news agency ANSA said two survivors had been pulled out of the rubble under the collapse.
Police footage showed firemen working to clear debris around a crushed truck, while other fireman nearby scaled broken slabs of the collapsed bridge support.
Transport Minister Danilo Toninelli told Italian state television the disaster showed the dilapidated state of Italy’s infrastructure and a lack of maintenance, adding that “those responsible will have to pay.”
