Indian Bridge Collapse Leaves 135 Dead – News Article #11
Last Sunday, a foot bridge collapsed in Morbi, India which left 135 dead.
The foot bridge is a colonial period suspension-style bridge that has been the cities main attraction for quite some time. The bridge collapse sent more than 300 people plummeting thirty feet into polluted waters.
According to Pokharel and Lahiri at the Wall Street Journal, the bridge is believed to have been damaged in a 2007 earthquake. Since then, the bridge underwent a series of repairs. Authorities are investigating the accident, including the businesses who did the repairs.
This article is news because it’s both bizarre and of human interest. Anytime a bridge collapses, it’s usually considered a bizarre event. Additionally, it is human interest because of the bridge collapsing and the lives involved.
This article seems to be written from an objective standpoint. It does use quite a few onsite interview attributions. The article is geared towards telling the story of an individual who was trying to meet a prospective bride for his brother. I don’t think those affect the objectivity of it though.
Additional comment: I noticed something very interesting about this article. Instead of focusing on the 135 that were killed and the additional 170 that survived the fall, the article focuses on safety and business malpractice. I found this very intriguing because although the news is the bridge collapse and the people who were killed or hurt, it tries to shift your focus away from that. Writing about business malpractice or safety is definitely not as exciting to hear about as the human interest or bizarreness of death by bridge collapse.
Friday, November 11th, 2022 @ 3:51 pm
I have not seen a lot of bridge collapse stories. This one did catch my eye, though. When I saw the video I was curious how people died. The fall was not that far, so that wasn’t it. Did they fall on each other? Did they drown?
As far as the business/malpractice, that’s something I’ve noticed often in reporting on India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. It could reflect an American bias against “shoddy” workmanship, or, more likely, it’s a focus on how construction in developing countries seems to take a lot of shortcuts that put people’s lives in danger.