A former goalkeeper for an Italian professional soccer club was reportedly among the survivors of Tuesday’s deadly bridge collapse in Genoa — miraculously walking away despite his car plummeting down among tons of rubble during the disaster.
“I was convinced it was going to end badly, but thank God I’ve lived to tell the tale,” one-time Cagliari netminder Davide Capello
. “I don’t know how my car wasn’t crushed. It seemed like a scene from a film. It was the apocalypse.”
Like dozens of others, Capello was driving across the Morandi Bridge around noon local time when a 260-foot section of the span abruptly crumbled during a violent storm, he told the outlet.
“I was driving along the bridge, and at a certain point I saw the road in front of me collapse, and I went down with the car,” said the 33-year-old Capello, who last played professionally in 2013 and is now a firefighter.
Capello’s car was one of at least 33 vehicles that fell nearly 150 feet onto a row of warehouses below, reportedly killing at least 35 people.
But the auto wound up “attached to a pylon,” and Capello managed to free himself and maneuver down the mountain of jagged concrete and twisted metal to waiting emergency workers.
Rescue and recovery efforts are ongoing to reach those still trapped beneath the rubble.
