2022 Morbi bridge collapse

The familiar span on a busy October evening

The bridge had been part of Morbi for decades: a low-slung suspension footway arcing over the Machchhu River, an unlikely little landmark in a town of ceramic factories and lamp-lit streets. Locals treated it like a living thing — a place to walk, to meet, to take a picture at sunset. On October 30, 2022, that ordinary intimacy drew a crowd. It was a weekend evening in late October, days after local repairs and a recent reopening, and visitors flowed onto the bridge in steady streams. People came to shop, to stroll, to visit vendors, to take children across the river — as they had for years.

Witnesses later described the bridge as crowded, not comfortably packed but busy enough that opposing streams of pedestrians crossed paths. That movement, the ebb and flow of people walking in both directions, introduced lateral sway into the deck. For most bridges and their users this sway is a nuisance, a distractingly lively motion you adapt to. For the Morbi span on that night it proved to be one of many small stresses that would compound into catastrophe.

When a little motion turned lethal

As evening cooled, the crowd thickened. People paused for photos, stopped to talk, and tried to make room for others. The bridge's suspension design meant that the deck rested on cables and fittings that translated vertical loads into tension. But a suspension bridge is also sensitive to side-to-side forces; when people move in opposing directions or a crowd surges, the dynamic load on bolts, attachments and deck planks increases markedly.

Around 6:30–7:00 p.m., something gave. Eyewitnesses reported a sudden lurch and a sound like breaking wood and metal. Planks collapsed beneath feet. Fastenings and brackets — the hardware that joined the deck to the suspension — failed in places. Sections of the walking surface tilted and dropped. Some people were flung into the river; others fell onto the jagged, rocky banks. Those who did not fall found themselves clinging to intact lumps of structure, or to each other, as the span listed and buckled.

It was not a single, cinematic rupture of cable and tower. The collapse occurred in segments: deck sections detaching, bolts shearing, fittings loosening. That fragmentation made the scene chaotic and unpredictable. Survivors would later struggle to explain the exact sequence: one moment the bridge felt wrong, the next the world had tilted and water and darkness and cries replaced the steady clack of footsteps.

Voices in the dark: rescue begins amid confusion

In the immediate minutes after the failure, the river and banks were a confusion of people and debris. Some who fell into the Machchhu could grab floating planks or tangle in twisted cables; others were swept by fast, murky currents into eddies and under overhanging wreckage. Local residents, shopkeepers and bystanders were the first to respond. They waded in where they could, tied ropes, lowered ladders and pulled people up onto safer ground. Ambulances and police arrived quickly, and within hours dedicated search-and-rescue teams — including Gujarat police, municipal responders and the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) — were on site with divers, boats and lights.

Hospitals in Morbi and the larger cities of Rajkot and Ahmedabad received the injured. Triage began on pavements and in emergency rooms. Some patients bore head and spinal injuries; others had fractures, lacerations or hypothermia from being in the water. The flow of bodies recovered and the list of missing grew over the night and into the next days as search teams combed the river and its banks. Panic and grief mixed with a grim determination: those who could, searched, pulled, and recorded names.

Authorities initially reported widely varying casualty figures as recovery continued; officials later consolidated the toll to at least 135 people killed and roughly 180–200 injured. Each number represented a person, a family, a network of responsibilities suddenly unmoored.

The repair that had only just been finished

What made the collapse so bitter was the timing. The bridge had been closed for maintenance and reopened only days before the disaster. Local municipal bodies and private contractors had carried out work and declared the structure fit for public use. That reopening — in the late days of October 2022 — meant that the bridge's users trusted that bolts, brackets and decks had been inspected, secured and certified.

In the days that followed, investigators focused on whether that trust had been warranted. Technical crews examined the remaining fragments, photographed failed connections and cataloged the hardware. Forensic engineers paid close attention to bolt sizes, the quality of welds, the presence or absence of washers and nuts, and evidence of corrosion. Early findings suggested that several critical fasteners had either been missing, undersized, corroded or fitted improperly — conditions that, under sustained and dynamic crowd loads, could allow connections to loosen and ultimately fail.

The physical evidence: what the wreckage showed

When engineers and police combed the twisted wreckage, patterns emerged. Sections of deck had detached where brackets should have held them. Bolts and nuts recovered from the river were cottered, worn or snapped. Metal plates showed signs of inadequate welding or shoddy replacement. Some parts bore the brown crust of corrosion, indicating long-term exposure without proper protection. In some cases, the replacement hardware did not match original specifications; in others, the connections had been repaired in ways that substituted fasteners for properly engineered anchorages.

Those technical observations fit a narrative seen in many infrastructure failures: a combination of degraded original elements, hurried or low-quality repair work, and load conditions that exceeded what the compromised structure could bear. When you add the crowd-induced lateral motion — increased by opposing foot traffic — the forces on each connection multiply. Bolts that might have held in normal conditions began to shear, and the deck lost its anchor point by anchor point.

Who answered for it: investigations, arrests, and policy ripples

Within days, criminal cases were filed. Police registered First Information Reports and questioned contractors, engineers and municipal officials involved in the bridge's maintenance and reopening. Several people connected to the repair work and local administration were arrested on charges including negligence and, in some reports, culpable homicide. Those arrests were the beginning of long legal processes: forensic reports were submitted, technical committees drafted assessments, and courts began reviewing evidence that would be weighed over months and years.

Beyond the courtroom, the collapse sent ripples through policy channels. Authorities at state and national levels ordered inspections of similar pedestrian and suspension bridges. Municipalities were urged — and in some cases directed — to tighten certification procedures, require third-party safety audits, and enforce clearer load limits and crowd-control measures for tourist structures. The disaster revived debates about the oversight of contracted repairs, the responsibility of local bodies to maintain public infrastructure, and how quickly bureaucratic systems could or should act to prevent future tragedies.

A town in mourning, a landscape scorched by loss

Morbi's social life had long orbited its bridge. After the collapse, the town's routines were altered by grief. Families collected at hospitals, lists of missing circulated on social media and in prayer halls, and funerary arrangements multiplied. The municipal government announced ex-gratia payments for the families of victims and for the injured, while hospitals logged costs for care and local businesses faced immediate drops in visitors as the town chose to pause its usual activities.

Rebuilding the physical bridge was not simply an engineering problem but a civic one. Plans to reconstruct or replace the span involved not only money and design but also questions about how to memorialize those lost and how to restore public trust. The town held commemorations; discussions about memorials and plaques took shape alongside engineering briefs.

What remains known, and what remains unsettled

Engineering inquiries converged on several broad conclusions: the collapse was not the result of a single, isolated cause but of multiple contributing failures. Poor or substandard repair work, missing or failing fasteners, signs of corrosion and a lack of rigorous certification before reopening all appeared to have played roles. The dynamic loads induced by crowding and opposing pedestrian movement amplified stresses in the compromised connections.

Legal processes — arrests, prosecutions and civil suits — unfolded over the months and years after the incident. Courts considered forensic reports and witness testimony, and municipal oversight practices came under scrutiny. Some officials and contractors faced charges; as with many complex infrastructure failures, conclusive legal determinations about responsibility and punishment proceeded slowly, through India's judicial system.

At a policy level, the collapse prompted stronger inspection regimes for similar public structures across Gujarat and other states. It forced municipalities and engineering departments to re-examine how they certify reopened infrastructure and how they manage tourist draws that concentrate crowds on aging structures.

A quiet, necessary reckoning

When a familiar piece of a town's landscape turns suddenly deadly, the sense of rupture is both physical and moral. The Morbi bridge had been an everyday crossing, a place for photographs and walks. That ordinariness turned the catastrophe into something intensely intimate for a community: neighbors lost neighbors, families lost parents and children, and a local landmark became an archive of unanswered questions.

The technical details — bolts that sheared, plates that failed, brackets that were inadequate — are chilling not because they are arcane but because they represent decisions: which materials to use, whether to test under load, whether to demand proper certification before people walked once more onto the span. Those decisions are made by systems: contractors bidding low, municipal offices under pressure to reopen attractions, or regulatory frameworks that permit shortcuts to stand.

In the months and years after October 30, 2022, Morbi and the broader engineering and administrative community engaged in a hard and necessary conversation about accountability and prevention. The answers that came were gradual: forensic reports, courtroom rulings still unfolding, new inspection mandates and the slow work of rebuilding both a bridge and the confidence to cross it again. The toll is fixed in numbers, but the consequences — for policy, for families, and for a town's sense of safety — continue to be measured long after the river ran cold beneath the twisted cables and scattered planks.