A stretch of highway in Sicily that collapsed only a week after its official opening will cost 200,000 euros to repair, to be financed and completed by the original construction company, the head of highways authority Anas SpA said Wednesday.
"Something happened that was not supposed to happen," said Pietro Ciucci, president of the government-owned agency that oversees Italian highways, as he surveyed the damage that has made national headlines.
He added he was "embarrassed" by the disaster on a one-kilometre stretch of a major highway between Palermo and Agrigento.
Independent experts are doing a separate analysis of the collapse for Anas with a view to possible legal action, he said.
"Evidently there was an error...in the process of planning or implementation," said Ciucci, adding he closed the Scorciavacche viaduct immediately to protect drivers.
"I knew I made a bad impression, I was aware of that," he said.
"But we had to protect our users".
The prosecutor's office in nearby Termini Imerese has opened its own probe into the affair, and contracted its own experts to analyze the situation.
Contractors from the Bolognetta ScpA group, which built the viaduct, had announced they had concluded the job on December 23 - six months ahead of the contractual deadline of March 23, judicial sources have said.
One week later, on December 30, a section of the highway collapsed and Ciucci said he "immediately challenged" the general contractor on the project The collapsed viaduct was part of a contract for some 34 kilometres of highway at an overall cost of more than 295 million euros while the cost of the strip of road declared finished December 23 was 13 million euros.
During the official opening of the stretch, Ciucci said the work carried out was "one of the most demanding of its kind" and proudly hailed its completion ahead of schedule.
After the news broke of the collapse, Premier Matteo Renzi tweeted that "the era of errors without ever any fathers is finished. Everyone will pay," and said he has asked Anas for the names of the people responsible.
Infrastructure Minister Maurizio Lupi called the collapse "unprecedented and unacceptable".
Ciucci said Wednesday that he has been calling on government for years to invest much more in crumbling highway infrastructure.
He acknowledged that one billion euros has been allocated for some 550 projects, but said more is still needed.
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