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China landslide: 91 missing in Shenzhen after pile of construction waste collapses Shenzhen landslide: 85 still missing after construction waste hits buildings
(about 14 hours later)
The number of people missing after a landslide in southern China has almost doubled to 91, after a huge mound of construction waste collapsed and buried 33 buildings in China’s latest industrial disaster. At least 85 people remain missing in southern China a day after a mountain of construction waste and soil swept over dozens of buildings, in the latest disaster to hit a nation increasingly facing the consequences of its rapid industrialisation.
Premier Li Keqiang ordered an official investigation into the disaster in the southern city of Shenzhen, which comes four months after huge chemical blasts at the northern port of Tianjin killed more than 160 people. Officials said debris from the 100-metre hill in Shenzhen, the city adjoining Hong Kong, buried or damaged 33 buildings on an industrial park, including factories, offices, workshops and dormitories.
A wall of mud smashed into multi-storey buildings at the Hengtaiyu industrial park in the city’s north-western Guangming New District on Sunday morning. The debris, excavated soil, cement and other construction waste had been piled on the hillside for two years amid the city’s ongoing construction boom, and was seemingly loosened by heavy rain.
The landslide was caused by the build-up of waste construction mud in the vicinity, the Ministry of Land and Resources said in a post on its official Weibo account. China’s premier, Li Keqiang, ordered an investigation into Sunday’s landslide, which came four months after a series of huge explosions at a warehouse filled with chemicals in the northern city of Tianjin killed at least 50 people.
Guangdong authorities sent a team to investigate and said the accumulation of a large amount of waste meant that mud was stacked too steep, “causing instability and collapse, resulting in the collapse of buildings”, the post said. China’s state-run Xinhua news agency said 85 people remained unaccounted for following the landslide, down from an earlier figure of 91 following new checks on missing people.
A nearby section of China’s major West-East natural gas pipeline also exploded, the official China Central Television (CCTV) broadcaster reported, although it was not clear if this had any impact on the landslide. Most are expected to have died. A website update by the firefighting bureau of the public security ministry showed photos of a huge area covered in thick red mud. Posts on the website said the mud had swept through many of the buildings, with the chances of survival seen as extremely small.
“The rushing mud was only 10 metres away from me,” an unidentified man told the Shanghai newspaper the Paper. “As I ran out of the village with another youth, I heard a large explosion,” he said. According to the state-run CCTV, just seven people were rescued overnight, and 13 were in hospital, three with life-threatening injuries.
A woman surnamed Hu told the Shenzhen Evening News she saw her father buried by earth in his own truck. “It’s been hours after he was buried, and we are quite worried,” she said. Liu Qingsheng, the vice mayor of Shenzhen, which was little more than a village before it was picked by China’s leaders in the late 1970s as a new industrial zone, said the landslide covered 380,000 square metres, about the area of 60 football fields.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, ordered provincial authorities to do everything possible to minimise casualties, treat the injured and comfort family members, the official Xinhua news agency said. Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted another official as saying the mud was up to 10 metres thick in many places, and inundated with water, making rescue attempts especially difficult as rescuers could not walk on it.
Li ordered central government officials to help Shenzhen authorities in the rescue, Xinhua said. China’s cabinet sent a group to help coordinate rescue efforts, which included more than 500 firefighters and 30 rescue dogs. One witness told AFP he was heading home when he saw the landslide. “I saw the houses collapse, all the factories got buried,” said Liu Youqiang, 45. A migrant worker told the agency that 16 friends or family members were missing after his home was buried.
Hundreds of rescuers sifted through rubble looking for survivors after the landslide left everything covered in mud, Xinhua said. The ministry of land and resources said said heavy rain had loosened the huge pile of building debris. “The pile was too big, the pile was too steep, leading to instability and collapse,” it said in a statement.
Fourteen factories, 13 low-rise buildings and three dormitories were among the buildings flattened. Some locals said officials had been negligent in allowing the waste to build up. “If the government had taken proper measures in the first place, we would not have had this problem,” one resident, Chen Chengli, told AP. “We’ve been down this road before, it’s too crazy.”
Xinhua said 14 people had been rescued and more than 900 people had been evacuated from the site by Sunday evening. His neighbour, Yi Jimin, dismissed the idea it was a natural disaster. “Heavy rains and a collapse of a mountain are natural disasters, but this wasn’t a natural disaster, this was man-made,” Yi said.
State television said that of the 91 missing, 59 are men and 32 women. The number of missing had earlier been put at 59 The landslide sparked an explosion in a section of a natural gas pipeline owned by PetroChina, the country’s leading oil and gas producer. By Monday morning, the fire was extinguished and a temporary section of pipe was being laid.
The frequency of industrial accidents in China has raised questions about safety standards following three decades of breakneck economic growth.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report