By DPA
Hanoi : At least 25 construction workers were killed in Vietnam’s southern Mekong Delta when a section of a 2.7 km bridge they were building collapsed Wednesday, police said.
Rescue workers were scrambling to dig by hand through tonnes of reinforced concrete under which dozens more workers were feared trapped or crushed, police said.
More than 200 workers were on the 74-metre section of the Can Tho Bridge when it collapsed at about 8.30 a.m., sending tonnes of concrete cascading to the banks of the Hau River, officials said.
“So far 25 bodies have been found,” said Duong Van Dep, a police official in Vinh Long province, 170 km southwest of Ho Chi Minh City.
“We’re still searching for survivors in the rubble,” Dep said, adding that three large cranes have been brought in to lift larger slabs of concrete.
At least 100 workers were pulled alive from the mountains of concrete and steel and rushed to hospital using handmade stretchers and any available vehicles, according to national Vietnam Television (VTV).
The section of the bridge that collapsed was over the muddy banks of the Hau River, not over the river itself, officials said.
Anh Manh Hung, head of one of the construction teams on another part of the bridge, witnessed the collapse, which began with what he said was a loud cracking sound.
“The whole sky was covered in clouds of dust and we could hear the screams of the workers,” Hung told local newspaper Tuoi Tre. “Block after blocks of concrete fell on top of the workers. It was a horrible scene.”
Health officials appealed for students and soldiers nationwide to donate blood to be sent to the area of Vietnam’s largest construction disaster in years.
Construction on the $343 million Can Tho Bridge, touted as South-East Asia’s longest cable bridge, began in 2004 with Japanese funding and was slated for completion next year.
The bridge was designed to offer an alternative to river ferries that now carry some 87,000 passenger and 20,000 cars daily across the Hau River, a tributary of the Mekong, between Can Tho and Vinh Long provinces.
Investigators were looking into what might have caused such a catastrophic collapse.