Hanoi - Search and rescue workers pulled more bodies from the rubble of a collapsed bridge project that killed at least 46 construction workers in southern Vietnam as the project's contractors were summoned by police to explain the disaster, officials said Friday. The search was made easier Friday by the halt of rains that had hampered rescue efforts, though officials admitted the focus had shifted to recovering bodies and hope of finding survivors had faded two days after the collapse Wednesday.
"Five more bodies were found last night. It has stopped raining and we are continuing to search," said Duong Van Dep, a senior police officer at the scene of the disaster in Vinh Long province, 170 kilometres sounth-west of Ho Chi Minh City.
The official toll on Friday was 46 dead and 87 people injured - revised down from earlier estimates from Vietnamese officials, Dep said, because some bodies had been counted twice.
Funerals were held for some of the victims on Friday in Vietnam's largest construction disaster in years. More than 250 construction workers were on a section of the Can Tho Bridge project when it collapsed at Wednesday morning, sending tons of concrete tumbling at least 30 metres to the ground below.
Hundreds of rescue workers were trying to cut through slabs of reinforced concrete and mountains of twisted steel to recover the remaining bodies.
"The scene of the accident is horrible," Dep said
Vietnam's government website reported that police had summoned the Japanese and Vietnamese contractors for the 343-million-dollar Can Tho Bridge, touted as Vietnam's longest cable bridge and set for completion next year, to explain the collapse.
No official cause has been named, but investigators were focusing on the scaffolding that had been holding up the 100-metre-long section of the bridge that collapsed.
Construction on the 2.7-kilometre bridge project began in 2004 with Japanese funding.
The Can Tho Bridge was designed to offer an alternative to river ferries that now carry some 87,000 passengers and 20,000 cars daily across the Hau River, a tributary of the Mekong, between Can Tho and Vinh Long provinces.
