A pedestrian bridge collapsed in India, killing at least 132 people

Sandipsinh Zala, an official in the city of Morbi, told the Indian Express that the company had reopened the bridge without first obtaining a “fitness certificate”. This claim could not be independently verified, but the state government said it had set up a special team to investigate the disaster.

The authorities said the building collapsed under the weight of hundreds of people. Security footage of the disaster showed the bridge shaking violently and people trying to grab its cables and green metal fence before the aluminum corridor receded and fell into the river.

Pictures from the disaster site showed the bridge split in the middle and the metal walkway dangling, its cables cut in some places. At least 177 survivors have been recovered from the river, and teams from the army, navy and air force are searching for others who are still missing, said Jigar Khunt, an official at Gujarat’s Ministry of Information.

State Minister Harsh Sangvi told reporters that 133 people had been confirmed dead and many others had been taken to hospitals in critical condition. Emergency responders and rescue workers worked through the night searching for survivors. He said that most of the victims were teenagers, women and the elderly.

It was not immediately clear how many people were on the bridge when it collapsed, but survivors said it was so crowded that the crowd was unable to move quickly to safety when its cable began to break.

“There were a lot of people on the bridge. We could hardly move,” said Bey’s friend, 27, as he recovered from injuries in a hospital bed in Morby.

A friend said he jumped into the water when the bridge began to crack and saw his friend crush from its metal walkway. He survived by clinging to the bridge cables, but his friend did not succeed.

“Everyone was crying for help, but one by one they started to disappear into the water,” said a friend.

Local news channels published photos of the missing shared by concerned relatives, and family members rushed to crowded hospitals in search of their loved ones.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while visiting his home state of Gujarat, said he was “deeply saddened by the tragedy”. His office announced compensation for the families of the dead and called for the rescue efforts to be expedited.

“I would rarely have felt such pain,” Modi said during a public event in the state on Monday.

Modi was Gujarat’s most senior elected official for 12 years before he became India’s prime minister in 2014. Elections for the Gujarat government are expected in the coming months and opposition parties have called for an investigation into the collapse.

The bridge collapse is the third major disaster in Asia and causes large crowds within a month.

Saturday, a Halloween crowd rush More than 150 mostly young men who attended the festivities were killed in Itaewon, a neighborhood in Seoul, South Korea. On October 1, the police in Indonesia They fired tear gas at a football matchcausing a rush that killed 132 people as onlookers tried to flee.

Infrastructure in India has long been marred by safety concerns, and my suppliers have suffered other major disasters. In 1979, a dam upstream of the Machu River burst, leaking water into the city and killing hundreds of people in one of India’s largest dam collapses.

In 2001, thousands of people were killed in an earthquake in Gujarat. The town of Morbi, located 85 miles (150 km) from the epicenter in Buj, sustained extensive damage. According to a report in the Times of India, the bridge that collapsed on Sunday was badly damaged.