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Safety Risks Contributed to Shenzhen Landslide, Chinese Reports Say Shenzhen Landslide Renews Questions on Risks in Fast-Growing China
(about 7 hours later)
HONG KONG — As rescuers searched Monday for survivors of a catastrophic landslide in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, a series of failures and ignored warnings that contributed to the disaster began to emerge. SHENZHEN, China — Rescuers searched for survivors in a sea of red mud on Monday, a day after dirt and construction debris engulfed dozens of buildings in this city in southern China, the latest of several man-made disasters in recent years to raise questions about the perils of the nation’s rapid growth.
The Ministry of Land and Resources said the landslide that destroyed at least 33 buildings on Sunday was caused by the collapse not of a hillside but of a sodden mountain of dirt and construction debris in an industrial area. At least 91 people were missing as of early Monday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Hundreds of emergency workers used bulldozers and earth movers to search a 94-acre area where some residents had for years worried that the dumping of debris so close to their homes was a crisis waiting to happen. The massive wave of earth buried or toppled 33 buildings, including apartments, worker dormitories and factories. As of late Monday, 81 people were still missing.
The rain-soaked material had built up for nearly two years at the site of a former quarry, Xinhua said, citing residents there. “Everyone was yelling, ‘Run, run,’ and I didn’t take anything except my baby,” Chen Qing said, as she nursed her 1-year-old son in a shelter for survivors set up in a nearby sports center. “I don’t know who’ll help us now. Everything in our lives has been left in the mud.”
China’s rapid construction of new buildings, and the short life of many of those structures, have long created problems with unregulated dumping of construction waste. Often the result is illegal, multistory piles of debris that appear on the outskirts of cities, creating problems with dust and flooding because of blocked waterways. The landslide was particularly unsettling, commentators said, because it occurred in Shenzhen, widely viewed as an ambitious, modern city that has hoped to rival its neighbor, Hong Kong.
The landslide on Sunday appears to have been one of the most destructive episodes yet connected with the practice. The destroyed buildings included at least three worker dormitories, and an unknown number of people may still be buried. It occurred about four months after explosions of toxic chemicals decimated a portside area of Tianjin, another coastal city that has envisioned itself as an engine for China’s economic rejuvenation. The blasts killed 150 people, and injured more than 700.
A gas pipeline also exploded during the landslide, Xinhua said. That section of the West-East pipeline, which brings natural gas from the Xinjiang region in western China, was then sealed, it added. Chinese news media have suggested that officials have allowed risks to fester, through corruption or laxity. The official response to such accidents, while often impressive in scale and speed, has done little to mute that criticism — in this case, by ignoring the danger from a growing pile of construction tailings and debris near factories and homes.
The China National Petroleum Corporation said on its official microblog on Monday that it found no signs of an explosion. “What is troubling about this accident is that it occurred in a first-tier city, Shenzhen,” said a commentary in The Beijing News, a widely read tabloid newspaper. “It is at the forefront of Chinese citizens in its level of modernization.”
Seven people had been rescued and more than 900 evacuated, the state-run China Central Television reported. An additional 13 people were hospitalized, it said. On Monday, residents who had fled the ocher-red mud said the semirural area should never have been used to dump dirt and rubble from local construction projects.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, called on Sunday for all-out efforts to find survivors. “They started piling up the dirt and waste roughly two years ago,” Li Xigui, a 52-year-old who has lived in the area for 15 years, said in an interview. “I knew something would go wrong in the future.”
Domestic news media was filled with frightening images of the destruction. Aerial photographs showed a sea of reddish-brown muck rising several stories along a series of buildings, some partly collapsed. Earth movers clawed at positions where buildings had been engulfed by the debris. He said that his home and adjacent workshop were swallowed up by the landslide, and that his mother had fractured a bone in her shoulder when her grandson yanked her out of the encroaching mud.
Cellphone video posted on the website of Caixin, a business news outlet, showed a cloud of material fill the air shortly before an industrial building of about six stories collapsed in a matter of seconds. “It all toppled,” a bystander is heard saying. “It’s all gone.” Dump trucks had piled dirt on the area, an old quarry, creating an unstable pile ripe for problems, he said. “When you put lots of dirt and waste in a place like this,” he said, “the pile can easily collapse and it doesn’t necessarily have to be in a rainy day.”
Mo Shaoqing, who dismantles old cars and sells their parts for a living, has lived near the industrial park with her husband in a small apartment building. The district has single-story houses, some factories assembling electronics, and low-rise apartment buildings. She said she saw bulldozers come every day to dump dirt in the former quarry, stopping only when it rained. A comment on the website of Caixin, a Chinese business and current affairs magazine, said: “We thought that this was another natural disaster, caused by soil erosion and many days of rain. But then everyone discovered that it was not mud from a natural hill that struck this industrial park and forced the collapses.”
Ms. Mo was chatting with neighbors Sunday morning when they heard a large boom. “The noise halted for a while and then started again, and it got louder and louder,” she said. “We were joking that it must be some rich people lighting lots of firecrackers.” Under Deng Xiaoping, Shenzhen grew from paddy fields in the late 1970s into a special economic zone for market-driven experimentation. It has increasingly moved into advanced industries like biotechnology and telecommunications.
In the Guangming New District, where the landslide struck, vegetable fields have been retreating, pushed back by spreading factories and neon-lit shops and restaurants.
In late 2012, when the newly appointed Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, wanted to established his bona fides as an economic innovator, he traveled to Shenzhen. On Sunday, Mr. Xi, now president, ordered officials to “make every effort to reduce the numbers of casualties.”
China’s rapid construction growth has long created problems with the dumping of building waste and displaced dirt, often resulting in illegal, multistory piles of debris on the outskirts of cities that block waterways and bring dust and flooding.
A company based in Shenzhen that conducts site surveys had previously warned of dangers at the site, Chinese news outlets said. The company, Zongxing Environmental Technology, published an environmental impact assessment report in January warning of erosion risks that might cause landslides, according to The 21st Century Business Herald, a business news publication.
The report, which was published on the company’s website, and a related notice on the website of the government of the Guangming New District appeared to have been deleted, the newspaper said.
A woman who answered the phone at Zongxing Environmental Technology said that the “relevant people are handling the incident” but declined to answer further questions. A spokeswoman for the Guangming New District Management Committee said that she was unable to answer specific questions and that all information would be given through the district’s microblog account and news conferences.
Many residents recalled puzzlement giving way to fear, even panic, when the landslide struck. Some recalled the sound of a large blast, although it was unclear whether an explosion set off the slide, or was caused by it. PetroChina said that its gas pipeline through the area had not exploded, despite earlier reports that it had.
Mo Shaoqing, who dismantles old cars and sells their parts, has lived near the industrial park with her husband in a small apartment building. She said she saw bulldozers come every day to dump dirt in the former quarry, stopping only when it rained.
Ms. Mo was chatting with neighbors on Sunday morning when they heard a large boom. “The noise halted for a while and then started again, and it got louder and louder,” she said. “We were joking that it must be some rich people lighting lots of firecrackers.”
Then, she said, they saw people running and warning others to flee. Only then did she realize a landslide was coming their way. “We were still in pajamas and slippers,” she said. “We had no time to get our stuff at home and immediately ran.”Then, she said, they saw people running and warning others to flee. Only then did she realize a landslide was coming their way. “We were still in pajamas and slippers,” she said. “We had no time to get our stuff at home and immediately ran.”
Some people who thought the slide had stopped climbed to the top of a low-rise building, Ms. Mo said. “The slide then hit those apartments, and I saw people on the roof fall off the building,” she said. By Monday night, rescuers had recovered seven survivors, but official news reports gave no details of confirmed deaths. A Shenzhen news website said that rescuers had received a call from a man trapped near a factory dormitory with eight other survivors, but there was no official confirmation of that report.
In Ms. Mo’s apartment later, many of the appliances were buried in dirt. She grabbed a few clothes before heading to temporary housing for those who had been displaced. Many of the missing people are likely to be migrant workers employed by factories near the collapsed hill. For now at least, those who escaped appeared too preoccupied with the immediate future to focus on questions of responsibility for the disaster.
Shenzhen was one of China’s first special economic zones, where free market economic measures were introduced in the 1980s. It has increasingly moved into advanced industries like biotechnology, as city leaders have pushed for further economic overhauls. The landslide demonstrated that Shenzhen’s success has not freed it from the risks of poorly regulated development. Guo Minghao, a factory worker originally from Henan Province in central China, said he was eating in a factory canteen when he heard shouts urging people to flee.
A commentary on Monday in The Beijing News, a newspaper in the Chinese capital, said the most surprising aspect of the disaster was where it happened. “ ‘There’s been an explosion, the hill is collapsing,’ everyone was shouting,” Mr. Guo said. “Some of my friends were on a day off, so I ran to the dormitory to tell them to leave, and then we all ran,” he said.
“In recent years, mudslides, landslides and other disasters do occur, but the incidents are more common in areas prone to geological disasters, or where resources are overexploited and governance is weak,” the commentary said. “It is reasonable to say Shenzhen is not one of those, and at the forefront of the modernization of Chinese cities.” On Monday night, he was preparing to sleep under an army-green, government-issue quilt in the district sports center. Like other workers gathered there, he wondered what would happen to his job, and the wages that he hoped to take home to his family during the Lunar New Year holiday in February.
A company based in Shenzhen that conducts site surveys had previously warned of dangers at the site, Chinese news outlets said. The company, Zongxing Environmental Technology, published an environmental impact assessment report in January warning of soil erosion risks that might cause landslides, “threatening the safety of hills and slopes,” according to the 21st Century Business Herald, a business news publication. “I don’t want to work here anymore, not after this disaster,” Mr. Guo said. “I don’t want to hang around, but what’s going to happen to our wages?”
The report, which was published on the company’s website, and a related notice on the website of the government of the Guangming New District, the region of Shenzhen where the disaster occurred, appeared to have been deleted, the newspaper said.
A woman who answered the phone at Zongxing Environmental Technology said that “relevant people are handling the incident” but declined to answer further questions. A spokeswoman for the Guangming New District Management Committee said that she was unable to answer specific questions and that all information would be given through the district’s microblog account and news conferences.
The Shenzhen Special Administrative Region Newspaper said Sunday on its site on the microblog service Weibo that the waste dump had been illegally approved by an official in the Guangming New District government. That report, which was cited by several Chinese news outlets, was later deleted.
More than a year ago, an individual living near the construction waste site complained about the din of honking dump trucks that began at 9 a.m. and continued until 3 or 4 a.m., according to an October 2014 article published by the state-run Shenzhen News. A representative of a local traffic enforcement office said that it would increase supervision of the trucks to limit noise and street-level pollution.