PICS: N3 pedestrian bridge collapses, injuring 5

Johannesburg - Five people were injured, one of them critically, in the early hours of Wednesday when an overhead pedestrian bridge collapsed onto passing cars along the N3 freeway in Germiston, Ekurhuleni.

A female passenger survived after being trapped inside the cab for about two hours while rescue teams battled to extricate her out of the wreckage

The South African National Road Agency (Sanral) said on Wednesday that its engineers and emergency services were at the scene where the overhead pedestrian bridge collapsed.

Engineers were already trying to ascertain the cause of the bridge collapse, Sanral said.

"Sanral confirms that a bridge over the N3 collapsed in the early hours of the morning. The road between the Van Buuren Road and the M2 Geldenhuys interchange has been closed," the road agency said.

Picture: DEMS

Earlier, Ekurhuleni’s Disaster and Emergency Management Services (DEMS) said several cars travelling along the N3 crashed as a result of the debris on the freeway. A woman was trapped in a truck. Rescue teams battled for about two hours to extricate her from the wreckage.

DEMS received the call at 01:23 and on arrival it was found that four vehicles, three trucks and a sedan crashed onto the concrete bridge lying across both North and South bounds of the freeway.

A total of five patients were accounted for from all vehicles. Three patients from one truck were still trapped inside the cab and two other from other different vehicles escaped with minor injuries, DEMS said.

Rescue teams had to use Jaws of life to rescue those trapped inside the cab of one truck. The driver and a seven-year-old girl were transported to Bertha Gxowa hospital in Germiston in stable conditions while the adult female passenger was airlifted to Linmed hospital in critical conditions.

The driver of one other truck sustained stable injuries and was transported to Charlotte Maxeke hospital while the fifth patient from a sedan sustained minor injuries.