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Home
» World News » Asia-Pacific » Focus on
China

China bridge collapse kills 28, injures 22

1,000-foot span over the Tuo river was under construction

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China bridge collapse

A bridge on the verge of completion in
south China collapses, killing at least 28 people.

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Deadly
collapse
Aug. 14: A bridge collapses in
China killing at least 28 people. MSNBC.com's Dara Brown reports.

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Updated: 9:37 a.m. ET Aug. 14, 2007

BEIJING - A bridge on the verge of
completion in south China has collapsed, killing 28 people and injuring 22 in a
possible indication of safety standards ridden rough-shod in the face of
breakneck economic development.

Dozens were missing after the
1,000-foot-long, 138-foot bridge spanning the Tuo river in Fenghuang county,
Hunan province, collapsed during the evening rush hour on Monday, even as
workers were stripping it of scaffolding, the official Xinhua news agency said
Tuesday.

Footage on state television showed
bulldozers and rescue workers picking through a massive pile of debris
stretching between two hills at the banks of the river, which flows through a
scenic area popular with tourists in western Hunan.

Story continues
below ↓

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“It is very difficult to recover
the missing buried under the rocks,” Xinhua quoted the county’s Communist Party
vice secretary Luo Ming a saying.

Cause of collapse under
investigation
Police had detained a construction manager and a
“project supervisor” for questioning, Xinhua said, but the cause of the accident
was still under investigation.

The collapse came as state media
reported that China would fix more than 6,000 damaged or dangerous bridges
across the country. A bridge collapse in June in the southern province of
Guangdong killed nine people.

Some 400 police had been sent to
the scene to keep order and more than 1,500 rescue workers were searching for
the missing, Xinhua said. More than 120 doctors and nurses were at the site.

“I saw a lot of bodies lying on
the road, some of them were construction workers, and some were passers-by ...
blood was everywhere,” witness Yang Shunzhong told Reuters.

“A car was crushed flat under the
bridge, it was so ruined that I could not even tell (its) size,” Yang said.

Workplace accidents sites are rife
in booming China, where patchy safety enforcement and corner-cutting by
contractors result in the deaths of thousands in the country’s coal mines,
factories and building sites every year.

Toll expected to
rise
Yang said the toll could rise much higher. “A lot of women
and children were ... crying and looking for their families or friends,” he
said.

Xinhua quoted Tian Jing, a
29-year-old construction worker on the bridge, as saying three men from his home
village were buried in the debris.

At least 123 workers were at the
site of the arched concrete bridge, which was to have been completed this month
and cost 12 million yuan to build, Xinhua said.

About 60 workers were on the
bridge itself when it collapsed, the State Administration of Work Safety said on
its Web site.

The collapse had cut off a highway
linking Fenghuang county to an airport in neighboring Guizhou province’s Tongren
region, a notice posted on the local government Web site said.

An editorial in the official China
Daily on Tuesday warned that thousands of the country’s bridges were unsafe. “If
left unrepaired these bridges may crumble at any time, wreaking economic havoc
and possibly claiming human lives,” it said.

The bridge disaster occurred days
after the death toll from the Interstate 35W bridge’s Aug. 1 collapse into the
Mississippi River in Minneapolis was raised to nine.

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Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights
reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly
prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

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