A civil engineering professor has once termed the Morandi bridge as a “masterpiece of engineering” in a TV interview.
But now the ‘masterpiece’ has collapsed, killing at least 30 people who ever unfortunate enough to be on or under the bridge.
At least 35 people were killed when a motorway bridge collapsed in torrential rains on Tuesday morning over buildings in the northern Italian port city of Genoa, according to the national news channels.
A 50-meter high 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 vehicles below and plunging huge slabs of reinforced concrete into the nearby riverbed.
“People living in Genoa use this bridge twice a day, we can’t live with infrastructures built in the 1950s and 1960s,” Deputy Transport Minister Edoardo Rixi said on SkyNews24, speaking from Genoa.
The Morandi viaduct, less than five kilometers to the west of Genoa’s old port, was built in the 1960s and completed in 1967. The flyover of the A10 motorway, named after the architect who designed it, spanned railway lines, buildings and the Polcevera stream around 45 meters below. Restructuring work on the bridge was carried out in 2016.
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See VIDEO of the bridge’s collapse uploaded by FANPAGE:
At least 30-35 vehicles on the bridge when the middle section came down, including three lorries. 13 people had been hospitalized, including five in a critical condition.
Some 200 firefighters were on the scene pulling people out from under the rubble.
Police footage showed firemen working to clear debris around a crushed truck, while another fireman nearby scaled some of the huge broken slabs of reinforced concrete that had supported the bridge.
A section of around 200 meters broke away at around noon (1000 GMT). Autostrade, a highway operator controlled by Atlantia which runs much of Italy’s motorway network, said it had been carrying out maintenance work on the bridge.
Witnesses have likened the scene of the horrific accident — the deadliest of its kind in Europe since 2001 — to an apocalypse.
The cause of the disaster was not immediately clear, although weather services in the Liguria region had issued a storm warning Tuesday morning.
Regional weather services had issued a storm warning for the morning of the collapse and the national police force said on Twitter the disaster happened amid a “violent cloudburst”.
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