Norway bridge collapses, drivers of 2 vehicles rescued
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- 16 Aug 2022
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A wooden bridge over a river in southern Norway collapsed early Monday, with a car plunging into the water and a truck getting stuck on a raised section. The drivers of both vehicles were rescued and doing well, police said.
Police were alerted shortly after 7:30 a.m. (0530 GMT; 1:30 a.m. EDT) that the bridge had collapsed as a truck and a car were crossing over it. The cause wasn’t immediately known.
The car plunged into the river while the truck remained on the bridge in a nearly vertical position on a section that was raised at a steep angle out of the water.
A helicopter assisted in the rescue operation and pulled out the truck driver, police said. The driver of the car managed to get out of his vehicle by himself.
The nearly 150-meter-long (500-foot-long) bridge connects the west bank of the Gudbrandsdalslaagen River and the village of Tretten. The bridge opened in 2012.
“It is completely catastrophic, completely unreal,” local mayor Jon Halvor Midtmageli told the Dabgladet newspaper. “It is also a fairly new bridge.”
“It is completely destroyed, everything has fallen down,” he added.
The Norwegian Automobile Federation said the bridge was checked in 2021, raising concern about the safety of such bridges.
“We who travel on the roads must be able to trust that the bridges are safe to drive on,” the organization’s spokeswoman, Ingunn Handagard, told the Norwegian news agency NTB.
Atle Formo, who lives by the Tretten bridge, said he heard “an intense crash.” Read More…
