Bus falls off bridge in Venice: At least one Frenchman among victims, what we know about this fatal accident

A bus carrying several passengers fell off a bridge in the outskirts of Venice (northern Italy) on Tuesday evening. “The provisional count shows at least 21 victims, including two children,” the governor of the Veneto region, Luca Zaia, announced at 11pm on Tuesday, deploring “a tragedy of enormous proportions”. The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, flew all the city’s flags at half-mast as a sign of mourning for the victims and their loved ones. On Wednesday, Zaya announced three days of mourning across Veneto for the “great tragedy”.

What happened ?

On Tuesday evening, around 7:45 p.m., a group of tourists from the town of Doges took a bus to the camp where they would spend the night. This bus is a regular shuttle operated on behalf of the company that manages the Hu Venezia camp. He was traveling on the curve of a motorway bridge with two lanes, a straight section and one-way traffic towards Marghera in Mestre district, when for an as-yet unknown reason, the driver of the bus got out of his vehicle. Traffic passed the first guardrail consisting of a lane and a metal guardrail, then a second metal barrier marking the crossing of the pedestrian from where he fell.

Firefighters rushed to the scene at the same time as workers who were finishing their day at a nearby shipyard. Boubacar Touré, 27, and his colleague helped get four people off 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 told me to think about the living, the injured, so I helped extract these people and get them out,” he told newspaper Il Gazzettino.

Why is the toll so high?

The box fell from a height of about 10m and crashed on its roof, crashing against the concrete parapets of the road that bordered the railway tracks of Mestre station below. It didn’t land on the train tracks. Under the impact, the vehicle caught fire and its occupants were trapped in a pile of sheet metal and bodywork. “The bus was completely wrecked. Firefighters had difficulty evacuating the large number of bodies,” Prefect de Bari told Sky Italia television. In the middle of the night, firefighters managed to raise the bus, but they found no body under the corpse.

According to Interior Minister Matteo Piandosi, the fact that the bus was a hybrid electric/methane vehicle was a “bad factor”: “the fire spread quickly”. “The number is sad and dramatic, but I fear it will rise,” he told public channel Rai1’s television news. “The batteries caught fire immediately after the impact,” confirmed Mauro Luongo, provincial commander of the Venice Fire Department.

Who are the victims?

About 40 people were on board. In this situation, 21 people died including the driver. Four of the dead are believed to be Ukrainian, one German and one French. A few-month-old baby and a 12-year-old boy were killed.

The bus also had passengers from France and Croatia. 20 people were taken to four hospitals in the area, and according to the latest report, 15 people were injured, five of whom, including a 4-year-old girl, were considered to be in critical condition. Four Ukrainians, one German, one French, one Croatian, two Spaniards and two Austrians were among the wounded, and four others have yet to be identified. Colonna said on X (formerly Twitter) overnight. All suffered injuries and severe burns. A Spanish tourist was transferred to a specialist center with burns over 60% of his body. A French tourist was able to leave hospital this Wednesday afternoon.

This Wednesday morning, emergency services in the Veneto region announced that 14 bodies have yet to be identified. “It’s necessary to continue with teeth or fingerprints,” explained director Paolo Rossi.

The driver, Alberto Risotto, 40, 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 was triggered

Ambulances from across the region, including dozens of police cars, were immediately dispatched to the scene. Coffins were brought to the crash site to hold the remains of the dead passengers.

The Venice Health Commission has implemented a “major emergency” protocol to recall health workers and provide all emergency rooms at hospitals in Mestre, Tolo, Mirano, Treviso and Padua. Physicians also came from Chioggia to Mestre to support teams in pediatrics, surgery, cardiac surgery, and neurology.

On Wednesday morning, an interpreter service was set up in German, Ukrainian, Spanish and French to communicate with the injured and relatives of the victims. According to the Italian interior minister, at noon on Wednesday, three families of people affected by the tragedy arrived in Venice.

What are the causes of accidents?

During the night, the Venice public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into several road murders, and the Attorney General of Venice, Bruno Cerchi, went to the scene. “At the moment, we are unable to carry out a precise reconstruction of events,” he told reporters overnight. The inspectors should check the road condition and compare it with the bus’s lane and braking marks.

The causes of the crash are currently being hypothesized, ranging from the driver falling asleep to a malfunction or a sudden change of direction. A Venice city councillor, Renato Boraso, told Italian media at an inquest that the driver, a 40-year-old Italian who was one of the victims, had been sick before the crash and had lost control. His bus was only a year old.

“Nobody knows exactly what happened yet. We do know there was a fixed camera on the viaduct. From the footage I’ve seen, from the little we see, we see the bus coming in at less than 50km/h, we see the stop lights on, so it must have braked. The vehicle veered onto the guardrail. , we see overturning, Massimo Fioris, CEO of La Linea Spa, the company that owns the bus, told La Stampa newspaper. During a press conference this Wednesday, Bruno Cerchi assured him “there was no sign of braking”. “There were no collisions with other vehicles, ” he said.