The identities of the 21 tourists who were killed in a coach crash near Venice, including nine Ukrainians, a toddler from Germany and a pregnant Croatian woman on honeymoon, have been confirmed, as controversy mounts over Italy’s ageing road infrastructure.
The coach crash – the second most deadly to have occurred in the country in the past decade – also killed a family of four from Romania, a couple in their mid-50s from Portugal, two Germans aged 28 and 32, a South African woman and the Italian driver.
Five children were among the dead, the youngest just 15 months old. Fifteen people, including three children, were admitted to hospital with injuries. Five are still in a critical condition.
Antonela Perkovic, 20, and Marko Bakovic, 25, newlyweds from Croatia, were on a road trip in Italy for their honeymoon, with Venice the final destination of a tour that included stops in Rome, Florence and Bologna. Perkovic, who was six months pregnant, was killed and Bakovic is among the injured.
All 38 passengers onboard the electric-powered bus, which was a year old, were being transported from central Venice to the Hu camping park in Marghera when the vehicle crashed through a guardrail and then a railing on an overpass. It plummeted 15 metres and burst into flames next to a train line at Mestre station.
The main theory is that the driver, 40-year-old Alberto Rizzotto, who had an untarnished record, had made a hazardous manoeuvre or had fallen ill. “There are no signs of braking nor contact with other vehicles,” said the Venice prosecutor Bruno Cherchi.
Video footage showed the vehicle “sliding along the guardrail for about 50 metres”, Cherchi said, before “pushing to the right” and veering off the overpass. “Witnesses said he had been driving slowly,” Cherchi added. “In any case, that section of road is initially uphill and so, objectively, it does not allow for high speeds.”
The guardrail is at the centre of the investigation, amid suggestions that a two-metre “hole” in the rusting barrier might have been to blame.
“After seeing the first images I understood straight away that the guardrail was outside of the norms,” said Domenico Musicco, the head of an association for road accident victims. “It was old and with a gap that should not have been there, as it is against the law to have interruptions in guardrails.”
Musicco said the tragedy might have been avoided if “new generation” barriers had been in place. Plans by Venice council to install New Jersey concrete barriers on that road had been extremely slow, Musicco claimed. “Some are in place but the works had not yet arrived at that particular part of the road,” he said. “It is a real Italian problem of slowness, of bureaucracy, of inefficiency, of laziness and of passing the buck. In the end, nobody takes responsibility.”
Venice’s councillor for transport, Renato Boraso, dismissed claims that the barrier was to blame, arguing that the “hole” was “a security and service opening that was provided for in the original design”. “The bus fell 50 metres after the gap, after sliding along the guardrail, without any sign of braking or counter-steering,” he told the Italian media. “Or do we want to claim that without the ‘hole’ the barrier would have withstood a 13-tonne moving, swerving vehicle?”
Italy’s transport minister, Matteo Salvini, from the far-right Lega, also weighed into the debate, claiming the accident was not caused by the guardrail. He pointed the finger instead at the electric battery and methane gas that powered the bus.
Citing the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa in August 2018, in which 43 people died, Musicco said that Italian road infrastructure was “very old in general” and often lacked maintenance.
Carlo Sorgi, a retired magistrate, said: “It is too early to make a judgment on the cause but from what we know the guardrail was badly maintained.” He added that previous incidents, including the Morandi Bridge, indicated that road maintenance in Italy was generally “very scarce”.
“Some money from the Covid recovery fund is destined for roadworks, but we have a chronic issue with slowness here,” he said.
