No fewer than four people were killed after a busy 200-meter (656-foot) suspension bridge collapsed in Ecuador, government officials said Friday.
When the bridge collapsed on Wednesday, four trucks, a car, and two motorcycles plummeted into the Magro River, about 50 kilometres (31 miles) north of the port of Guayaquil.
Footage from the aftermath showed a truck leaning over a guardrail at the bridge’s edge, metres from a torrent that submerged the structure.
“The bodies of four missing people have been found,” the National Secretariat of Risk Management posted on X.
According to the report, rescuers were still looking for one person who went missing.
The bridge connected the province of Guayas, which includes Guayaquil, to other provinces in the north of Ecuador.
Guayas Governor Marcela Aguinaga stated that she has received no reports of it being faulty.
“From what we can deduce at this point, the bridge was overloaded,” she wrote on social media platform X.
The bridge collapsed in the middle of the Andean nation’s rainy season.
The risk management ministry said that flooding and landslides have killed at least 20 people and damaged 45 bridges.
