THE incident yesterday morning in which a SUV plunged into the sea after a collision was the fifth such incident on the Penang Bridge since 2010.

In yesterday’s incident, a private college student Moey Yun Peng, 20, lost control of his vehicle after being hit by another car before plunging off the bridge at 2.54am yesterday. As of 3pm today, the search-and-rescue operation to locate him was still ongoing.

Based on records obtained by Bernama, the first such incident was reported on September 20, 2010, when a young married couple were killed after the multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) they were travelling in crashed into the railings before plunging into the sea at 1.30am.

In the second incident on November 1, 2012, Tan Lean Loon, 24, a clerk, was killed when his vehicle crashed into the bridge’s side guardrail before hitting a lamp post and plunging into the sea at Km7.9 George Town-bound at 3.30am.

The third incident occurred in 2015, when a man was thrown into the sea after the motorcycle he was riding grazed another motorcycle at Km1.4 at 9.30am on October 30.

The victim, Mohammad Noor Firdaus Yahya, 24, suffered slight injuries when his body fell into the mud under the bridge.

On November 12, 2015, a man was thrown out of a car and fell off the bridge when he lost control of the car he was in at Km0.6 of the Penang Bridge Perai-bound in the 5.49am incident. – Bernama, January 21, 2019.