News Ponte Morandi/Polcevera Viaduct bridge collapse in Genova, IT

[Urwumpe]

Just got news that the renown Ponte Morandi bridge (also known as the Polcevera viaduct) at the shore of Genova (crossing a railroad and and industrial park) collapsed at noon during a thunderstorm. There are reports of many deaths, it was a pretty frequented road, a four lane highway towards France. The bridge was constructed in 1968 from reinforced and pre-stressed concrete.

I hope nobody here got hurt or lost someone close.



The bridge is already removed in Openstreetmap, very fast editing.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/44.42626/8.88811

When I first saw the pictures of the collapsed bridge, I remembered driving over its virtual counterpart in ETS2.

There is also an identical bridge by the same engineer Riccardo Morandi in Venezuela, so investigating the cause of the collapse could really save lives in the future.

A bridge made during the same decade from prestressed concrete collapsed in my hometown a few years ago. The constructions of that period have the tendency to a very bad case of corrosion now, the technology of pre-stressed concrete was still new and people learned a lot about its long-term behavior later.

 

[Ripley]

Temporary toll: 35 dead, 10 missing.

 

[Urwumpe]

Temporary toll: 35 dead, 10 missing.

Its really big luck that its just such a low number... despite a traffic jam on one lane of the bridge during the collapse. Looks like the 3400 employees of a company below the bridge also had the luck that their factory was closed for holidays and nobody was around when the buildings got damaged.

 

[Ripley]

Yes, but they have still to remove the bigger chunks of the bridge, and who knows what they will discover under. They just said that the rest of the standing bridge is deeply damaged and it risks collapsing over the SAR teams.
There are also 16 heavily wounded in local hospitals.
A couple drivers were recovered alive and in relatively good conditions.

 

[fred18]

I have lived quite close to that bridge for 6 years, going back and forth almost every day.... I have many friends who passed on the bridge yesterday or this morning before the accident, some others who spent the day blocked because they had to pass but they remained trapped in the traffic jam due to the accident. It's the first time that I see the "safety check" of Facebook active and on so many people I know, I am super shocked... And it's difficult to imagine something more scary than a bridge that fell under your car and a free fall of 100 meters trapped in it...