The preliminary hearing for the 59 people investigated for the collapse of the Morandi bridge, the motorway viaduct that collapsed on 14 August 2018, causing the death of 43 people, will begin on October 15. The judge has scheduled three hearings a week until the end of December.
In addition to natural persons, the two companies Autostrade and Spea (a former subsidiary that dealt with maintenance and inspections) are also under investigation. The charges, for various reasons, are of willful collapse, attack on transport safety, road homicide, multiple negligent homicide, forgery, omission of official acts and willful removal of safety devices in the workplace.
The hearings will be held in the tensile structure in the court atrium to comply with the anti-contagion rules. After the request for indictment, the activities of prosecutors Massimo Terrile and Walter Cotugno, coordinated by the adjunct Paolo D’Ovidio, continued. The soldiers of the first group of the financial police have in fact heard other people informed of the facts. As last July 14, when the financiers heard an employee of Tecno El who had installed a monitoring system on the viaduct until 2014.
“The contract was not renewed after that date. I remember that in the caissons, in the last inspection carried out in 2016 to check the failure of the sensors, there was rainwater and guano. Autostrade staff did not access the bins because they had a certain reticence ».
The investigations lasted three years during which hundreds of witnesses were heard, thousands of files and documents acquired. There were two evidentiary incidents: one on the state of the viaduct at the time of the collapse and the other on the real causes of the disaster