Dozens Fear Dead As Italy Bridge Collapse

A bridge on a main highway linking Italy with France has collapsed in the Italian port city of Genoa during a sudden, violent storm, sending vehicles plunging 45 metres into a heap of rubble below.

The Morandi bridge is a main thoroughfare connecting the A10 highway that goes toward France and the A7 highway that continues north toward Milan.

Inaugurated in 1967, it is 90 metres high and just over a kilometre long, with the longest section between supports measuring 200 metres.

Italian authorities from the Liguria region raised the death toll to 26 after more bodies were extracted and one of the 16 injured died in surgery.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte called it "an immense tragedy … inconceivable in a modern system like ours, a modern country."

The head of the country's civil protection agency, Angelo Borrelli, said all of the victims appeared to have been in vehicles that plunged from the bridge.

Hundreds of firefighters and emergency officials were searching for survivors in the rubble with heavy equipment.

At least four people were pulled alive from vehicles under the bridge, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

"We are still trying to extract survivors from the rubble," Genoa police official Alessandra Bucci said.

"We hope to find more people alive."

See more pictures from the scene below: