One of the wooden footbridges in Skopje's City Park was destroyed today. Not by a storm, not by flooding, not by age. By an excavator.

Workers tried to move an excavator across a bridge built for pedestrians. The wooden structure didn't hold - the planks gave way, and the bridge is now unusable. Photographs spread across social media, which is also where the story first surfaced.

„As if the park weren't wrecked enough, now they've broken the bridge with an excavator they tried to move to the other side and of course it collapsed,” one resident wrote on X.

The plan was visible two days earlier

The ugliest detail isn't the collapse. It is what happened before it. According to residents, workers were spotted two days earlier setting up improvised ramps on the bridge - preparation for the crossing.

„I saw what they were doing, but I thought it would hold,” another resident wrote.

So: there was a plan. There was preparation. There were people watching for days as someone got ready to drive heavy construction machinery across a footbridge - and it occurred to nobody that this was a bad idea worth reporting.

Who approved this?

These bridges are wooden, narrow and built for people. They carry no maximum load sign because nobody ever assumed one would be needed. An excavator weighs tonnes. You don't need an engineering degree for that calculation - you just need someone to stop and look.

The questions are simple and deserve an answer from the City of Skopje and the contractor: who hired these workers, for what job in the park, and who signed off on the machine crossing that bridge instead of going around it? Was approval even sought?

City Park has been a building site for years now, one residents look at with resignation. Every reconstruction brings fencing, dust and delay. This is the first time the work has ended with a destroyed bridge - and that is exactly what makes the case worth an answer, rather than one more post that vanishes in three days.