MILAN: The search operation for those missing after a motorway bridge collapsed in the Italian port city of Genoa ended overnight after the last three bodies were found, bringing the official death toll to 43.

A 200-metre section of the Morandi bridge gave way in busy traffic on Tuesday, plunging vehicles and chunks of concrete and twisted metal to the ground 165 feet below.

After three bodies were recovered from a car crushed under slabs of concrete, the Genoa prefecture raised its official death toll. Nine people are still in hospital, four in a critical condition, it said.

While all those listed as missing had now been accounted for, fire brigade official Stefano Zanut told Sky TG24: “Our work continues in order to have the full certainty that nobody has been left under the rubble.” He said workers were also making the site secure and helping investigations to establish the cause of the disaster.

The viaduct was part of the A10 motorway linking the port city with the French border to the west and was managed by toll-road operator Autostrade per l’Italia, a unit of infrastructure group Atlantia. Autostrade pledged half a billion euros on Saturday to rebuild the bridge and set up funds to immediately assist the families of the victims and those displaced from their homes by the collapse and reconstruction work.

The government will launch a plan next month aimed at making Italy’s infrastructure safe, Giancarlo Giorgetti, undersecretary in the prime minister’s office, said in a newspaper interview, saying it would include motorways, bridges and viaducts but also public buildings such as schools.

“It will be a maintenance operation with no precedents, with enormous investment in public works,” he told Il Messaggero.

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2018