A bus with many passengers fell off a bridge on the outskirts of Venice (northern Italy) on Tuesday evening. “The preliminary figure shows at least 21 victims, including two children,” announced Luca Zaia, the governor of the Veneto region, on Tuesday around 11 p.m., lamenting “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 families.
What happened ?
Tuesday evening, around 7:45 p.m., a group of tourists who came from the Doge City took the bus to the campsite where they were supposed to spend the night. The bus is a shuttle bus that runs regularly on behalf of the company that manages the Hu Venezia campsite. He was traveling on the ramp of a two-lane, one-way, one-way motorway bridge in the Mestre district towards Marghera when the driver of the bus got out of his vehicle for an unknown reason. He fell into the lane and crossed the first barrier, which consisted of a metal guardrail, and then the second metal barrier demarcating the pedestrian crossing, from where he fell.
The bus crashed through a double metal barrier. Portal/Manuel Silvestri
Workers who had just finished their day at a nearby shipyard rushed to the scene of the accident at the same time as the fire department. Boubacar Touré, 27, and his colleague helped free 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 fireman then told me that we need to think about the living and the injured, so I helped him rescue and get these people out,” he told the Il Gazzettino newspaper.
Why is the toll so high?
The bus fell from a great height, about 10 m, and crashed violently on its roof into the concrete parapet of a street that bordered the railway tracks of the Mestre train station below. It didn’t end up on the railway. The impact caused the vehicle to catch fire and its occupants were trapped in the pile of metal and bodywork. “The bus is completely crushed. “Firefighters had difficulty evacuating a large number of bodies,” Prefect Di Bari told Sky Italia television. Late at night, firefighters managed to raise the bus, but did not find a body under the carcass.
According to Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, the fact that the bus was a hybrid electric/methane vehicle was an “aggravating factor”: “The fire spread quickly.” “The number of victims is tragic and dramatic, but I fear that it will rise,” he told public broadcaster Rai1. “The batteries caught fire immediately after the impact,” confirmed Venice Fire Department provincial commander Mauro Luongo.
Who are the victims?
There were almost 40 people on board. As of this writing there are 21 dead, including the driver. Four of the victims are Ukrainians, one is German and another is said to be French. A few-month-old newborn and a 12-year-old boy were killed.
The bus also carried passengers from France and Croatia. 20 people have been transported to four hospitals in the region, the latest report says 15 are injured and five of them are in very serious condition, including a four-year-old girl. Among the injured are four Ukrainians, a German, a Frenchman, a Croatian, two Spaniards and two Austrians; 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 severe burns. A Spanish tourist suffered burns to 60% of her body and was transferred to a specialized center.
Late on 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 has worked on these buses for seven years.
The Major Emergencies protocol has been triggered
Ambulances from across the region were immediately sent to the scene, including dozens of police cars. Coffins were brought to the scene of the accident to bury the remains of the killed passengers.
The Venice Health Authority has activated the “major emergencies” protocol, which provides for the recall of health workers and the provision of all emergency rooms in hospitals in Mestre, Dolo, Mirano, Treviso and Padua. Doctors also came to Mestre from Chioggia to support the teams in pediatrics, surgery, cardiac surgery and neurology.
Portal/Manuel Silvestri
An interpreting service in German, Ukrainian, Spanish and French was set up on Wednesday morning to communicate with the injured and the victims’ families.
What are the causes of accidents?
That night, the Venice Public Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation and the Venetian Attorney General Bruno Cherchi visited the crime scene. “At the moment we are not able to accurately reconstruct the events,” he told the press overnight. Investigators must check the condition of the road, compare it with the bus’s trajectory and any skid marks. THE
The causes of the accident are currently being formulated in hypotheses, ranging from the driver falling asleep to a breakdown or an event that could have caused him to suddenly change direction. A Venice city councilor, Renato Boraso, told Italian media that one line of investigation was that the driver, a 40-year-old Italian man who was among those killed, had been ill before the accident and that he appeared to be feeling unwell and His bus, a vehicle that was only a year old, lost control of the car.
“Nobody knows exactly what happened yet. What we do know is that there was a permanently installed camera on the viaduct. From what I have seen of the pictures, from what little we see, we see the bus arriving at less than 50 km/h, we see the brake lights flashing, so it would have braked. “We then see that the vehicle leans against the guardrail, tips over and falls,” Massimo Fiorese, CEO of La Linea Spa, the company that owns the bus, told La Stampa newspaper.