AHMEDABAD, 29 August 2003 — Twenty-one children and two adults were killed yesterday when a bridge crumbled on the western Indian coast, plunging a school bus and four other vehicles into a river, police said.
The two ends of the 325-meter bridge collapsed inward under the weight of a school bus, a mini-bus and three motorcycles in Daman, a popular Arabian Sea resort 193 kilometers north of Bombay.
“Twenty-three people have died in the tragedy, 21 of them children,” Daman Inspector General of Police R.P. Upadhyay told AFP by telephone.
The bridge fell apart as heavy rain poured down in the former Portuguese colony. Upadhyay said the bridge was built in 1983, relatively new by Indian standards.
“It just suddenly caved in. We’re looking to see why it happened,” he said. “The tide has now receded so we’re sending divers into the river.”
Daman municipal official Vishal Tandal said 28 people, 24 of them students, were rescued after the bridge collapsed at 1:25 p.m. (0755 GMT) over the Daman Ganga river.
Up to 900 people were assisting rescue operations, with fishermen who raced to the site in their trawlers pulling the school bus out of the water, Tandal told the Press Trust of India news agency.
The Indian Coast Guard and Navy were also called in to help, Upadhyay said.
A doctor at Daman’s Marwar Hospital said 15 patients had been admitted after the bridge collapsed and that wounded people continued to pour in hours later.
“We fear that some people could have been swept by the current into the sea,” the doctor said.
Daman and Diu, across the Gulf of Cambay, were ruled by Portugal from the 16th century until 1961. They remain administered directly by New Delhi, unlike Gujarat state which surrounds them.
