VENICE, Italy — Residents of the Italian city of Venice stopped in dismay Wednesday to pay respects to the 21 foreign tourists who were killed when an all-electric shuttle bus crashed through an overpass guardrail and fence, plunging more than 10 meters to the ground.
A video shows the city-owned bus disappear from the frame, as another larger bus traveling behind it continued along the overpass. Prosecutors said the shuttle bus scraped against the guardrail for at least 50 meters before its fiery crash to a surface road opposite the Venetian borough of Mestre’s train station.
The tourists are all believed to have stayed at the Hu Venezia Camping in Town, just a 15-minute drive from the shuttle bus’s pickup point at Piazzale Roma, at the edge of Venice’s famed canals linked to the mainland by a bridge. “I won’t forget what I saw for the rest of my life,” Brugnaro, the mayor, told The Associated Press from his office in Mestre. “Seeing all those people crammed inside a bus, down there, is something you can’t describe.
On its website, Yutong shows newer models with multiple electronic safety systems including a lane departure warning, automatic emergency braking, collision warning and collision mitigation control. “When we went in, we saw the driver right away. He was dead. I carried a woman out on my shoulders, then a man,” Erheneden told the local newspaper il Gazzettino.