China: Highway Bridge Section Collapses Mid-Construction, Injures 4 [NSFL]

A bridge section still being installed comes down across a live lane of the Cangyu Expressway in Baoding, Hebei, caught clean on a passing car’s dashcam.

Four people get hurt in the process: 3 construction workers, 2 of them seriously, plus a truck driver who just happened to be driving through at the wrong moment. Nothing like watching the job itself become the hazard.

Video

The footage is dashcam video from a car cruising down the Cangyu Expressway, a nav overlay in the corner still counting down 4 km to an exit. Up ahead, a steel gantry frame sits across the road mid-installation, a crane parked right next to it, looking like any other overpass job in progress. A couple of seconds later the whole frame is down, lying diagonally across the carriageway in a wall of dust, right as the car is closing in on it.

The dashcam car threads through the open lane while a couple of vehicles sit near the wreckage with their hazards on, and the collapsed span is still visible, dust and all, as the car pulls away and it fades into the rearview. Nobody getting hit shows up on camera, but the post behind the clip says 3 workers and that truck driver ended up in the hospital, 2 of the workers in serious condition. A whole span down in a matter of seconds, gone before you’ve even processed what you just watched.

What the Thread Said

Most of the replies went straight for the easy joke, treating a steel span dropping onto an open highway as business as usual for construction standards over there. A few pushed back, with one pointing out Japan has had its own bridge section come down and crush a car in years past, so it’s not some exclusive trait. There was also some real curiosity about the near miss, people trying to figure out whether the oncoming lane actually cleared the falling structure or just got lucky with the timing.

China’s String of Bridge Construction Collapses

The collapse in this video is one more entry in a run of deadly accidents on China’s fast-expanding rail and highway bridges.

• 12 killed, 4 missing when the Jianzha Yellow River rail bridge collapsed in Qinghai, Aug 2025, workers fell about 100 meters after a cable link snapped.
• 6 killed in Yunnan, Aug 2024, when a crane erecting a bridge toppled after a misoperation.
• 21,800 workplace safety accidents nationwide in 2024, down 11% from the year before.
• 19,600 deaths from those accidents in 2024, down 7.6% year on year.
• Major and extra-major accidents dropped to 9 cases with 146 deaths, almost half the prior year’s count.

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