Mexico City Metro Overpass Collapses, Killing at Least 23

 

At least 23 people have been killed and dozens injured after a metro overpass collapsed in Mexico City while a train was travelling on it.

An elevated section of the metro collapsed and sent a subway car plunging toward a busy boulevard. The overpass was about 5 meters (16 feet) above the road in the southside borough of Tlahuac, but the train ran above a concrete median strip, which apparently lessened the casualties among motorists on the roadway below.

Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said 49 of the 70 injured were hospitalized, and that seven were in serious condition and undergoing surgery.

Sheinbaum said a motorist had been pulled alive from a car that was trapped on the roadway below. Dozens of rescuers continued searching through wreckage from the collapsed, preformed concrete structure.

“There are unfortunately children among the dead,” Sheinbaum said, without specifying how many.

 “A support beam gave way,” she said, adding that the beam collapsed just as the train passed over it.

“Rescue efforts were briefly interrupted at midnight because the partially dangling train was “very weak.”

“We don’t know if they are alive,” Sheinbaum said of the people possibly trapped inside the subway car.

Hundreds of police officers and firefighters cordoned off the scene as desperate friends and relatives of people believed to be on the trains gathered outside the security perimeter.

The collapse occurred on the newest of the Mexico City subway’s lines, Line 12, which stretches far into the city’s southside. Like many of the city’s dozen subway lines, it runs underground through more central areas of the city of 9 million, but then runs on elevated, pre-formed concrete structures on the city’s outskirts.

The Mexico City Metro, one of the largest and busiest in the world, has had at least two serious accidents since its inauguration half a century ago.