An electric bus carrying foreign tourists in Venice smashed through a guardrail, plunged off an elevated roadway and burst into flames on Tuesday. The crash killed at least 21 people with 18 others injured, with many of the injured in intensive care. Local residents were quick to help before first responders arrived but were held at by the resilient blaze. Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro called the crash scene “apocalyptic” on X.
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The crash happened on Tuesday in Mestre, Italy, the mainland portion of Venice just on the other side of the lagoon from the historic city center, The Associated Press reports. The bus was shuttling tourists from Venice to a campsite in nearby Marghera. While the precise cause of the crash has yet to be determined, authorities believe the driver had a sudden medical problem and caused the bus to veer off the road.
The bus fell off the overpass over 30 feet onto a road adjacent to the tracks at Mestre’s railway station. Two residents heard the impact from their apartment and rushed to the scene. Boubacar Touré from Gambia and Odion Eboigbe from Nigeria risked their lives to pull people out of the burning wreckage, according to the BBC:
“We ran down to the spot where the bus was on fire and I heard a woman screaming, ‘My baby, my baby,’” 27-year-old Boubacar, who is from The Gambia says, his eyes heavy with exhaustion.
“I managed to pull her through the window and then pulled out her son, who was badly burnt but still alive.”
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Boubacar describes how he grabbed the fire extinguisher from the bus to help quell the flames – but that wasn’t enough.
“Passers-by were giving me other extinguishers but nothing helped, we had to wait for the firefighters”, he recalls. “So I pulled others to safety, a woman and a man and a child. People were bleeding from their heads, there was so much blood.”
It took hours for firefighters to put out the blaze once they arrived. The fire was so intense that DNA samples will be needed to identify some victims. Mauro Luongo, Venice’s fire brigade commander, told the AP: “The people in the bus found themselves surrounded by flames. The scene we found was terrible. It took about one hour to extract some of the bodies.”
The tragedy has raised several questions in Italy about road safety. The aging barriers that line the overpass are visibly rusted which may have allowed the bus to take the horrific plunge far too easily. Also, there’s the general concern surrounding lithium-ion battery fires, as there were people at the scene almost immediately who couldn’t fight the flames even with the equipment stored on the bus.