A bus carrying passengers fell from a bridge in Mestre, a town in Venice, Italy, in the early evening of Tuesday, October 3. According to the Italian agency ANSA, the provisional toll stands at fifteen dead, and ten bodies have already been extracted from the vehicle, which fell near a railway line. The newspaper La Repubblica, which quotes the mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, reports “at least twenty dead” at this stage – a figure confirmed to Agence France-Presse (AFP) by a spokesperson for the elected.
“A tragedy struck our community this evening,” causing “many victims among those present on board the bus that fell,” Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said on Facebook, describing “an apocalyptic scene.” Train traffic on the railway line between Mestre, on the coast, and the center of Venice, on the lagoon, was interrupted.
The president of the Italian council, Giorgia Meloni, immediately expressed “her deep condolences”. “I am in contact with Mayor Luigi Brugnaro and Minister [of Transport], Matteo Salvini, to follow the news of this tragedy,” she wrote in a statement.
According to information from the daily Il Corriere della Sera, the scheduled bus left its lane on the bridge which spans a railway line between Mestre and Marghera, two localities forming part of the municipality of Venice and overlooking its famous lagoon. The vehicle then fell near the railway tracks below after falling around thirty meters.
According to the Venice Fire Department, the bus “caught fire” afterward. The Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, believes that “the aggravating factor was the methane fueling [of the bus], so the fire spread quickly”. “The toll is tragic and dramatic, but I fear that it will increase,” he told the television news of the public channel RAI 1. The causes of the accident “still need to be established,” he said. he added.
The most serious accident of this kind in Italy to date occurred on July 28, 2013. A coach carrying around fifty passengers, all from the province of Naples and returning from a three-day excursion, fell a viaduct of around thirty meters near Avellino, around fifty kilometers east of Naples. Thirty-eight people died instantly, two succumbed to their injuries.
