2023-10-04 13:27:31
A bus carrying many passengers fell from a bridge on Tuesday evening in a peripheral district of Venice (northern Italy). “The provisional toll shows at least 21 victims, including two children,” Luca Zaia, the governor of the Veneto region, announced Tuesday around 11 p.m., deploring “a tragedy of enormous proportions.” The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, had all the city’s flags flown at half-mast, as a sign of mourning for the victims and their loved ones.
What happened ?
Tuesday evening, around 7:45 p.m., a group of tourists who came from the city of the Doges went by bus to the campsite where they were to spend the night. The bus is a shuttle which operates regularly on behalf of the company managing the Hu Venezia campsite. He was traveling on the ramp of a motorway bridge with two lanes of traffic, a straight section and in one direction, in the Mestre district towards Marghera, when, for a reason still unknown, the driver of the bus got out of his vehicle. traffic lane and crossed the first protection consisting of a metal guardrail then the second metal barrier which demarcates the pedestrian crossing, from where he fell.
The bus smashed through a double metal barrier. REUTERS/Manuel Silvestri
Workers who had just finished their day at a nearby shipyard rushed to the scene at the same time as firefighters. Boubacar Touré, 27, and his colleague helped extricate four people from the bus, including a little girl and a small dog. “I saw the driver in the bus cabin, but he was already dead. The firefighter then told me that we had to think about the living, the injured, so I helped him extract these people and get them out,” he told the newspaper Il Gazzettino.
Why is the toll so heavy?
The coach fell from a great height, approximately 10 m, and crashed violently on its roof against the concrete parapets of a road bordering the railway tracks of the Mestre station below. It didn’t land on the railroad. Under the effect of the impact, the vehicle caught fire, its passengers trapped in the pile of sheet metal and bodywork. “The bus is completely crushed. The firefighters had difficulty evacuating a large number of bodies,” prefect Di Bari told Sky Italia television. Late in the night, firefighters were able to lift the bus, but they found no body under the carcass.
According to Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, the fact that the bus is a hybrid electric/methane vehicle was an “aggravating factor”: “the fire spread quickly”. “The toll is tragic and dramatic but I fear that it will rise,” he told the television news of the public channel Rai1. “The batteries caught fire immediately after the impact,” confirmed the provincial commander of the Venice Fire Department, Mauro Luongo.
Who are the victims ?
Nearly 40 people were on board. At this stage, there are 21 dead, including the driver. Four of the victims are Ukrainian, one is German, and another is believed to be French. A newborn baby a few months old and a 12-year-old boy were killed.
The bus also carried passengers from France and Croatia. 20 people were transported to four hospitals in the region, and according to the most recent report, 15 are injured and five of them are in a condition considered very serious, including a 4-year-old girl. Four Ukrainians, a German, a Frenchman, a Croatian, two Spaniards and two Austrians are among the injured, four others have not yet been identified. “We are in contact with the Italian authorities to identify possible French victims,” French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said on X (formerly Twitter) overnight. All suffered trauma and serious burns. A Spanish tourist suffered burns on 60% of her body and was transferred to a specialized center.
Late this Wednesday morning, emergency services in the Veneto region announced that 14 bodies had not yet been identified. “It will be necessary to proceed with dental or fingerprints,” explained Paolo Rossi, the director.
The driver, a 40-year-old man named Alberto Rizzotto from Treviso, is described by his colleagues as a serious and experienced driver, who had been working on these buses for seven years.
The “major emergencies” protocol triggered
Ambulances from across the region were immediately dispatched to the scene of the accident, including dozens of police cars. Coffins were brought to the scene of the accident to place the remains of the killed passengers.
The Venice Health Authority has activated the “major emergencies” protocol which provides for the recall of healthcare workers and the provision of all emergency rooms in hospitals in Mestre, Dolo, Mirano, Treviso and Padua. Doctors also came from Chioggia to Mestre to support the teams in pediatrics, surgery, cardiac surgery and neurology.
REUTERS/Manuel Silvestri
On Wednesday morning, an interpretation service in German, Ukrainian, Spanish and French was set up to communicate with the injured and the victims’ relatives.
What are the causes of the accident?
During the night, the Venice public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation, and Venice Attorney General Bruno Cherchi visited the scene. “For the moment, we are not able to carry out a precise reconstruction of the events,” he told the press overnight. The investigators must check the condition of the road, compare it with the trajectory of the bus and any traces of braking. THE
The causes of the accident are currently formulated in hypotheses, from the driver falling asleep to a breakdown or an event which could have led him to suddenly change direction. A Venice city councilor, Renato Boraso, told Italian media that one line of inquiry was that the driver, a 40-year-old Italian who was among those killed, had fallen ill before the accident and that he apparently felt unwell, losing control of his bus, a vehicle that was only a year old.
“No one yet knows exactly what happened. What we do know is that there was a fixed camera on the viaduct. From what I have seen of the images, from what little we see, we see the bus arriving at less than 50 km/h, we see the stop lights coming on, so it would have braked. We then see that the vehicle leans against the guardrail, overturns and falls, Massimo Fiorese, CEO of La Linea Spa, the company that owns the bus, told La Stampa newspaper.
#Bus #fell #bridge #Venice #Frenchman #among #victims #deadly #accident