AIROLO (Switzerland) Oct 25: At least 11 people are dead and 128 missing one day after a truck crash sparked an inferno in a road tunnel through the Swiss Alps, officials said on Thursday.
A second fatal accident near another Swiss tunnel further snarled traffic by drastically reducing Italy’s main road links to the north.
Officials have so far confirmed 10 men and one woman died after two trucks collided in the Gotthard tunnel on Wednesday, setting off a fierce fire which engulfed victims trapped in the world’s second-longest road tunnel.
Gotthard, linking the Swiss towns of Goeschenen in the north with Airolo, 15 km from the Italian frontier, is one of the heaviest north-south transport routes in Europe and a major crossroads for goods linking Germany and northern Europe to Italy and the Mediterranean.
Rescuers have still not been able to reach the crash site, some 1.5 km into the southern end of the narrow tunnel, and there was no certainty about either the number of vehicles involved or the victims.
Police said late on Thursday that 128 people were reported to be still missing — up from the 80 given earlier in the day — but they added that the figure could be inflated by anxious relatives ringing more than one emergency service.
“When it comes to the number of missing, the situation is chaotic,” said Romano Piazzini, head of police in the canton of Ticino, told a news briefing.
HEAT AND FUMES SUBSIDING: Rescue workers said the heat and the fumes were subsiding inside the narrow 17-km two-lane Gotthard tunnel, but the danger that the roof could collapse was hampering efforts to reach the scene of the accident to search for bodies.
“The fire is now under control on the south side, and police investigators have now gone in,” said another police official in Ticino, which borders Italy. “But the infrastructure has been seriously damaged and it is very dangerous in there.”
Parts of the tunnel’s roof collapsed, burying between 10 and 40 vehicles, police said.
A second fatal truck crash in the Swiss Alps closed the key diversion route through the six-km St Bernhard tunnel, the closest alternative to the Gotthard, for hours.
Local police said a truck crashed into a car and a mini bus after it exited the tunnel, killing the mini bus driver.
The St Bernhard route reopened to traffic around mid-day but it took hours to clear the backlog of trucks in Ticino and at Chiasso, the main border crossing from Italy.
“It’s utter chaos, we’ve got lines of traffic in all directions,” Ticino traffic police chief Marco Guscio said.
Thick smoke felled some fleeing travellers just a stone’s throw from safety and temperatures reached 1,000 degrees Celsius, fusing cars and trucks into a molten mass. Smoke was still coming out of the tunnel’s ventilation shafts on Thursday.
At the St Bernhard, the winding four-lane highway descending from the tunnel toward Italy was closed for northbound cargo traffic for hours, causing major bottlenecks.
CRUSHING BLOW TO ITALIAN LIFELINE: Officials said the Gotthard tunnel, badly damaged by the intense fire and a powerful explosion which ripped through it shortly after the crash, was likely to remain closed for weeks.—Reuters