The present study deals with the structural safety evaluation of a 50-year-old river bridge, called Baghetto Bridge, located in north Italy on the Adda River. Generally speaking, hydraulic processes are the main cause of bridge failure. Scour and hydrodynamic loads have been largely studied by the hydraulic engineering community; however, in practice, integration with structural analysis is often missing. The aim of this research is to provide a multidisciplinary procedure based on hydraulic and dynamic investigations devoted to the structural verification and monitoring of river bridges with traditional mechanical bearings. The deck–river interaction is addressed, studying the influence of debris accumulation on the bridge and performing structural verification of the bearing supports. The actions exerted on the bridge deck by the river current were estimated following the recommendations of the Italian code and making some further assumptions. In addition, dynamic investigations and FE modelling were performed. The results show (1) a relatively fast procedure that can be applied by practitioners to perform structural verification of river bridges with traditional mechanical bearings, and (2) an investigation method to evaluate temperature–frequency correlation as a reference for future inspections.

This dataset was developed as part of the research study “Bridge collapses in Italy across the 21st century: survey and statistical analysis.” The dataset has been updated and now documents 250 bridge collapse events that occurred in Italy between 2000 and 2025. Each entry includes some general information and a proposed event classification. The former includes, the date and location of the collapse, geographical coordinates (WGS84), administrative division, bridge use classification, number of fatalities and injuries. The classification of each collapse is characterized by four major fields: severity (Total Collapse or Partial Collapse), general cause (Natural or Human-induced), mechanism (Triggered or Not-Triggered), and specific cause (e.g. hydraulic phenomena, overloads, impacts, or material degradation).