The flags are at half-mast on Wednesday October 4 in Venice, the day after a tourist bus fell from the top of a bridge, which left at least 21 dead, including two children, as the controversy surrounding the road conditions in Italy.
The main hypothesis held by the local authorities is that the bus driver, a 40-year-old Italian, may have felt unwell. For Domenico Musicco, president of the Association of Victims of Road Accidents at Work, the state of the roadway is to blame. “It’s a tragedy foretold,” he told Agence France-Presse. “This rail is made for a country road whereas here we needed new generation equipment which could have prevented the bus from falling.”
“The rail looks like a simple balustrade,” added the director of the company operating the damaged bus, Massimo Fiorese, quoted by the Italian agency ANSA.
The Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, expressed “her deep condolences”, while the Italian Senate observed a minute of silence on Wednesday at the opening of its work.
The hypothesis of the driver feeling unwell
The precise circumstances of the accident are not yet known, but if the preferred hypothesis is that the driver was unwell, the poor maintenance of the road network on the peninsula is also once again being debated.
The bus was carrying around forty Italian and foreign tourists who had just visited the heart of the Serenissima and were returning to their campsite, shortly before 8 p.m., on behalf of the Venice public transport company, ACTV.
For a still undetermined reason, the vehicle, which was traveling on a bridge, hit the safety rail and rushed into the void, crashing around ten meters lower, near a railway line linking Mestre and Marghera, two localities part of the municipality of Venice. “Among the injured, who number fifteen, are a German, a Frenchman, a Croat, two Spaniards and two Austrians,” said the governor of the Veneto region, Luca Zai. Ukraine, for its part, reported four of its nationals killed and four injured.
A similar accident occurred on July 28, 2013 when a coach carrying around fifty Italian passengers fell from a viaduct near Naples, killing 40 people. In August 2018, the collapse of part of the Morandi bridge in Genoa caused 43 deaths.