The tragedy took place late Monday, March 4 in the afternoon in Labège, a town in the near suburbs of Toulouse, which was delighted to finally be connected, from 2028, to the Pink City metro. Six people were working on the construction site of the third metro line when a section of a bridge under construction collapsed, causing the death of one of them, and injuring three others, two of whom were very serious.
“Four [people] were on it at the time of the collapse and jumped” from a height of around ten meters, explained in the evening, the public prosecutor Samuel Vuelta-Simon, who spoke who arrived on site shortly after the incident and whose services opened an investigation. One of them died from her injuries, he said. “A priori”, it was the “breakage of a jack, between two piers of the aerial metro site”, which caused the tragedy, he argued.
As of 5:05 p.m., according to the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (SDIS) of Haute-Garonne, around fifty firefighters and twenty vehicles were on site to take care of the victims and, as a precaution, probe the rubble.
Among the three injured, two are in absolute emergency and were hospitalized at the Purpan University Hospital in Toulouse, the prosecutor said. The fourth victim, in relative emergency, was treated by a clinic and the last two employees escaped unharmed.
“Tonight, it is above all emotion that prevails with the death of an employee. We will never get used to such accidents, such tragedies,” the president of the Toulouse public transport network Tisséo, Jean-Michel Lattes, told the regional daily Dépêche du Midi.
The bridge collapsed over twenty meters
A psychological support unit has been set up, Tisséo said in a press release, who also sent “sincere condolences to the family” of the victim. “No other victims recorded at this time. No [employee] is missing but searches are being made as a precaution,” said Mr. Vuelta-Simon.
The accident took place on a section of the future line C construction site, in an area closed to the public, a source within the SDIS specified at the end of the afternoon, therefore excluding the presence of passers-by. It was “a serious accident, due to its scale”, explained this source, describing a “quite impressive” scene where “around twenty meters of bridge collapsed”.
“Tisséo engineering (…) immediately opened a crisis unit, in conjunction with the Bouygues company which is carrying out the work on the bridge, to understand what could have happened, in parallel with the investigation by the labor inspectorate which will “to look into the safety conditions on the construction site,” the president of Tisseo also declared to La Dépêche du Midi. The labor inspectorate was on site as of Monday evening, noted the prosecutor.
Line C of the Toulouse metro, work on which was launched at the end of December 2022, is due to enter service in 2028.
