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China bridge collapse kills 29

By ALEXA OLESEN, Associated Press Writer Tue
Aug 14, 1:33 PM ET

BEIJING - The collapse of a bridge under construction that left at least 29
people dead in a Chinese tourist town rekindled concerns Tuesday about rushed,
shoddy building amid the country's economic expansion.

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Witnesses heard a rumble and saw stones fall from the structure Monday
afternoon after construction workers removed scaffolding from the 140-foot-high,
880-foot-long vehicle and pedestrian bridge across the Tuo River in the southern
town of Fenghuang.

"The whole thing collapsed," said Nong Xiaozhong, one of two survivors in a
12-man construction team working under the bridge.

"There was no time to warn the other workers and I just managed to run a few
steps before I was covered under the stones," Nong said in a telephone interview
from the Fenghuang Chinese Medicine Hospital where he was being treated for pain
in his abdomen. "I crawled to the road nearby and an ambulance came in 10
minutes. I was rescued."

The accident came less than two weeks after the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota that drew attention to aging transport
infrastructure in the United States. Nine people were confirmed dead in that
collapse, and divers are still seeking the bodies of four missing motorists
presumed killed.

In China, rescuers managed to save 86 people,
including 22 who were injured, many from the 123 workers on the site at the time
of the collapse, the government's Xinhua News Agency reported. The death toll
rose steadily as rescuers with trained dogs and bulldozers sifted through mounds
of toppled concrete.

Police detained two officials from the builder, the state-owned Hunan Road
and Bridge Construction Co., Xinhua said, even as the Work Safety Administration
of Hunan province, where Fenghuang is located, said the accident's cause was
under investigation.

The collapse was likely to fuel already deep public concerns about the
quality of construction in a country undergoing breakneck economic development
and where corruption among contractors and officials is common.

The state-run China Daily, in a report Tuesday, said that the Ministry of
Communications last year deemed 6,300 bridges as dangerous because of serious
damage to their "structural components." It quoted a prominent engineer as
warning that many new bridges were poorly designed and built and that China
needed to heed the Aug. 1 collapse of a bridge in Minnesota that killed at least
nine people.

China should "learn a lesson" and accelerate the inspection of unsafe
bridges, the newspaper quoted Xiao Rucheng, secretary-general of China's
Institute of Bridge and Structural Engineering, as saying.

Premier Wen Jiabao called for a thorough investigation into Monday's
collapse, saying those responsible would be "severely dealt with."

Fenghuang — an ancient trading town surrounded by lush mountains and rice
paddies, and known for the colorful dress of its Miao, or Hmong, ethnic natives
and its traditional stilt houses along the Tuo — has aggressively promoted
itself as a tourist destination.

Nong, the construction worker, said that he and his fellow workers worried
that the bridge's stone arches were too large and that the mortar was not dry
enough to remove the scaffolding. "But after all, we trust those engineers," he
said.

When the bridge collapsed, "there was a huge amount of dust that came up and
didn't clear for about 10 minutes," said a witness, a cleaning lady at a local
hotel who gave her surname as Wu and said she had just passed under the bridge
on a bicycle when the span fell.

China Central Television showed bulldozers plowing through the rubble,
overturning chunks of stone and concrete mixed in a tangle of steel
reinforcement bars.

Xinhua described a grim scene of bodies being pulled from the toppled
concrete. "Their arms and legs were broken, only linked with skin," Xinhua
quoted Yang Long, a villager whose home was just a dozen yards from the site, as
saying.

The Fenghuang collapse is among the worst in recent memory. On June 15, a
bridge over the Xijiang River in south China's Guangdong province collapsed when
a cargo vessel loaded with sand rammed into it, killing nine people.

In January 1999, 40 people died when a pedestrian bridge spanning the Qi
River in southwestern China's Sichuan province collapsed just three years after
it was built. In that case, a local party secretary was sentenced to death for
accepting a bribe from a childhood friend in exchange for the bridge-building
contract.

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