Genoa's Broken Bridge
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2019
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
An icon of Italian design; a centrepiece of a community; a tragedy waiting to happen? When the Morandi bridge opened in 1967, it was one of the longest concrete bridges in the world, connecting the port of Genoa with the rest of Italy and Italy with northern Europe. Built during the post-war economic boom, it was the centrepiece of Italy’s plans to modernise its roads and was a proud symbol of the country’s engineering and architectural expertise. But all that came to a tragic end in August last year when a section of the bridge collapsed killing 43 people and leaving 600 people without a home. Helen Grady speaks to people whose lives have been touched by the bridge from the moment it was built to the moment it collapsed. And she asks how such a vital piece of infrastructure, carrying thousands of cars and lorries every day, could be allowed to fail. Producer Alice Gioia (Image: Flowers placed on railings near the collapsed Morandi Bridge in Genoa. Credit: BBC/Alice Gioia)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | As I record this it's almost a year since the Genoa Bridge collapse and like everybody when I saw the photos I was gobsmacked. |
| 0:08.0 | Having lived and worked in Italy I never thought something like that could happen in a country that's so famous for design and engineering. |
| 0:16.0 | I'm Helen Grady and for the past month I've been working with my brilliant Italian BBC colleague |
| 0:22.0 | Ali Cheyya to try to find out how and why the bridge collapsed. On the 14th of August I was going to get a season ticket |
| 0:37.0 | on the 14th of August I was going to get a season tickets for Genoa |
| 0:40.0 | football club. I remember it was raining heavily. |
| 0:43.0 | Davide Capello was driving across one of Italy's most famous fire ducts, the Marandi Bridge. |
| 0:50.0 | When I got halfway across the bridge, heard a dull sound all around me. |
| 0:55.0 | What did it sound like? |
| 0:57.0 | It wasn't a bang, it wasn't an explosion. |
| 1:01.0 | It seemed like something made of steel had broken. |
| 1:06.1 | So a metallic sound? |
| 1:07.7 | Yeah, a crack, as if something had split open. |
| 1:15.0 | 30 meters below in the flat she shared with her sister, |
| 1:19.0 | Mimacerto, heard the same sound. I was in the shower. |
| 1:26.0 | I was in the shower. |
| 1:27.0 | I heard the sound like thunder that seemed to go on forever. |
| 1:31.0 | A metallic sound, like something colliding with iron, and I couldn't |
| 1:36.4 | work out if it was a lorry that had fallen on the railway. |
| 1:41.4 | Then I started to hear people rushing into the street and voices shouting. |
| 1:47.0 | For the last time I mean, I did tell me to speak. |
| 1:51.0 | For a few seconds I was stunned. I couldn't work out where the sound was coming from and then I saw that everything ahead of me was starting to collapse |
... |
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