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A wooden bridge over a river in southern Norway collapsed early Monday, with a car submerged in the water and a truck stuck on an elevated section. The drivers of both vehicles were rescued and are safe, police said.

The car fell into the river while the truck remained on the bridge in a nearly vertical position in a section that was raised at a sharp angle out of the water.

A helicopter assisted in the rescue operation and retrieved the driver of the truck, police said. The driver of the car managed to get out of his vehicle on his own.

The nearly 150 meter long bridge connects the west bank of the river Gudbrandsdalslaagen and the village of Tretten. The bridge opened in 2012.

"It's completely devastating, completely unreal," local mayor Jon Halvor Midtmageli told Dabgladet newspaper. "It's a fairly new bridge."

"It's completely destroyed, everything has fallen down," he added.

The Norwegian Automobile Federation said the bridge was inspected in 2021, raising concern about the safety of such bridges.

"We who travel on the roads should be able to believe that the bridges are safe to drive on," the organization's spokeswoman, Ingunn Handagard, told Norwegian news agency NTB.

The Norwegian Public Roads Administration said on Monday it wanted an independent investigation into the collapse.

“It must be safe to drive on Norwegian roads. That's why it's important to get to the bottom of this case," said the head of the administration, Ingrid Dahl Hovland.

Atle Formo, who lives next to Tretten Bridge, said he heard "a loud crash".

"The whole house was shaking. I was raising the blinds in the bedroom and I looked right at a bridge over the river," he told Norwegian television network TV2.

A similar nearby bridge at Sjoa in the Gudbrand Valley, also made of glulam, collapsed in 2016. The driver of a truck crossing the bridge at the time of the collapse was slightly injured.

Following this collapse, 11 similar bridges, including the one in Tretten, were temporarily closed by the government body responsible for Norway's infrastructure. The agency said "the immediate cause of the bridge collapse is a faulty link in the frame."

Norwegian Transport Minister Jon-Ivar Nygård was due to visit the site of the latest bridge collapse later on Monday.

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