At least 35 people were killed when a motorway bridge collapsed in torrential rains on Tuesday morning in the northern Italian port city of Genoa, Italy’s ANSA news agency cited fire brigade sources as saying.
A 50-metre-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 told SkyNews24, speaking from Genoa.
Within hours of the disaster, the anti-establishment government which took office in June said it showed Italy needed to spend more to improve its dilapidated infrastructure, ignoring EU budget constraints if necessary.
