This new structure was put up to replace the original bridge over the Humuya river, which had fallen on June 28th. Authorities had planned to build a more durable structure next year, hopefully with financial donations from other countries.
This bridge cost 25 million Lempiras to build, but it will cost the company who created it much more.
Friday at seven in the evening, Luis Roberto Rivera, testified that he was driving a heavy truckload of oranges and was headed for Nicaragua. “I just thought about death. We thought we were going to drown. It took several minutes to leave the vehicle. There was nobody here to help,” he said. Also in the vehicle were his young son and an assistant. His son suffered minor injuries to his head.
Carlos Leiva, a representative of the company who built the structure, came to the scene to make a technical assessment of what happened, “We do not know what went wrong. We are looking into it. “
The driver, Rivera, stated that his load contained one hundred thousand oranges, only thirty thousand of which were recovered. “The company that built the bridge is ready to pay us damages amounting to roughly half a million lempiras, complete with truck repair,” he said.
The vice mayor from the Municipality of Santa Rita, said that the City had nothing to do with building the bridge, it “was a project that Soptravi did for the government. We were just invited to the opening and were not aware of who did the assessment,” he said.
Unfortunately, people were aware from the outset that the temporary access was unsuitable for heavy vehicles, but there was never a sign in place to warn drivers of that fact.
“Thank God it was not a bus with passengers because it could have been much worse,” commented one neighbor.
One Response to "Bridge Collapses 14 Days After Opening"
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What went wrong was as always, most likely corruption, I wonder if all the bags of cement paid for the proyect were used, or if the metal structure suffered the same fate, less than required used?
It is a shame, we win on one side and loose on another, the most unfortunate fact about all of this is that the people of Honduras had come to accept this ocurrences as “normal every day business” and it should not be like that.