Genoa bridge collapse: Death toll rises to 39 amid scramble to save people trapped

At least 39 people were killed and 15 injured when a major motorway bridge collapsed in Genoa, in northern Italy.

More than 300 rescue workers were using heavy equipment and dogs to search through the rubble for survivors and at least four people have been pulled alive from vehicles under the bridge, ANSA reported.

The disaster saw a 50m high section of the Morandi Bridge crash down when as many as 35 vehicles were driving on it on Tuesday. Huge slabs of reinforced concrete plunged onto two warehouses, train tracks and a riverbed.

More than 400 people were evacuated from buildings near or below the still-standing section of the bridge.

At least two people were missing.

Aerial footage showed trucks and cars stranded either side of the collapsed section of the bridge, which was built on the A10 toll motorway in the late 1960s. One lorry was just metres away from the broken edge of the bridge.

Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, called it “an immense tragedy ... inconceivable in a modern system like ours, a modern country.”

What caused the bridge to fall remained unknown, but prosecutors have said they were opening an investigation and the country’s transport minister, Danilo Toninelli, said the collapse was “unacceptable” and if negligence played a role “whoever made a mistake must pay.”

Within hours of the disaster, the anti-establishment government which took office in June said the collapse showed Italy needed to spend more on its dilapidated infrastructure, ignoring EU budget constraints if necessary.

“We should ask ourselves whether respecting these limits is more important than the safety of Italian citizens. Obviously for me, it is not,” said the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, who is head of the right-wing League, which governs with the 5-Star Movement.

The government has already pledged to increase public investment and lobby the European Commission to have the extra spending excluded from EU deficit calculations.

Mr Salvini also said he wanted the “names and surnames of those who are to blame, because a tragedy like this in 2018 is not acceptable.”

“They will have to pay, pay for everything, and pay a lot,” he said.

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 bridges and viaducts built in the 1950s and 1960s. Updating and reinforcing the bridges would be more expensive than destroying and rebuilding them with technology which could last a century, the society said.

The design of the bridge has been criticised in the past. In a 2016 interview posted online, Antonio Brencich, a University of Genoa professor specialising in reinforced concrete construction, said: “This bridge is usually characterised as a masterpiece of engineering, but in reality it is a failure of engineering.”

He did not say at the time that it was in danger of collapsing, but that it required continuous maintenance and would eventually have to be torn down and replaced.

The 1.2km-long bridge was completed in 1967 and overhauled in 2016. The motorway it carries is a major artery from northern Italy’s industrial centres to the Italian Riviera and to France’s southern coast.

It was the second deadly disaster on an Italian motorway in as many weeks, with a tanker truck carrying highly flammable gas exploding after rear-ending a stopped truck and getting hit from behind near the northern city of Bologna on 6 August.

The accident killed one person, injured dozens and blew apart a section of a raised eight-lane motorway.

Additional reporting by agencies