(CNN)More than 80 people were missing Monday after a man-made pile of construction waste and trash collapsed on buildings in an industrial park in south China, according to Chinese state media. The Chinese government ordered immediate rescue efforts following the landslide in Shenzhen, a city in Guangdong province. At least 16 people were still hospitalized, three in serious condition, according to Shenzhen's emergency response office. Police received a report of the landslide Sunday morning, authorities said. More than 700 people were involved in searching the debris for signs of life, they said. Eleven firefighting teams along with four drones and 30 search dogs were involved in the effort, the Guangdong Public Security Bureau said. Officials set up a rescue command center and three treatment shelters on site. Dumping ground The source of the landslide was a man-made pile of earth rather than a natural mountain or formation, according to China's Ministry of Land and Resources, whose team of experts is investigating the site. The landslide covered an area of 380,000 square meters, the state-run Xinhua news agency said. Locals told Xinhua that hundreds of trucks carrying construction waste used to dump trash into the pile every day. A security guard working in a factory in the area told Xinhua that a 250-yuan ($38) fee was charged per truck. He Weiming, a migrant worker from Henan province, told state media that many of his relatives were buried in the debris. "My father, mother, son, daughter, wife, sister and her child, sister-in-law and her three children and other five workers were all in there," he said. "I've made more than 40 calls; none of them got through. At first they didn't go through, and now the phones are powered off. When my brother and I left home in the morning, everything was fine. But when we got back around 11:40 a.m., our house had been buried. You couldn't even see the top of the once 4-meter-high building." CNN's Shen Lu, Kevin Wang and Tina Burnside contributed to this report.
Safety Risks Contributed to Shenzhen Landslide, Chinese Reports Say 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. 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. The rain-soaked material had built up for nearly two years at the site of a former quarry, Xinhua said, citing residents there. 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. Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE Landslide Hits Southern City, Sending Hundreds Fleeing, China ReportsDEC. 20, 2015 Fushun Journal: Coal, Which Built a Chinese City, Now Threatens to Bury ItOCT. 6, 2015 Behind Deadly Tianjin Blast, Shortcuts and Lax RulesAUG. 30, 2015 graphic Tianjin Blasts Expose the Dangerous Proximity of Toxic Chemicals in ChinaAUG. 21, 2015 In China, a Building Frenzy’s Fault LinesMARCH 13, 2015 Shenzhen, Then and Now (2008) 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. Photo Firefighters resting near collapsed buildings at the site of a landslide in the Chinese city of Shenzhen on Monday. CreditChina Network/Reuters 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. The China National Petroleum Corporation said on its official microblog on Monday that it found no signs of an explosion. 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. China’s president, Xi Jinping, called on Sunday for all-out efforts to find survivors. 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. 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.” Continue reading the main story Graphic: Second Red Alert for Beijing: Air Pollution Worsens 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. 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.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story 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. 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. 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. Photo A woman praying near collapsed buildings in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The destroyed buildings included at least three worker dormitories, and an unknown number of people may still be buried. CreditLam Yik Fei/Getty Images 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. “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.” 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. 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.
Government don't do shit till some really bads happens...fcking China, can't even make me proud from time to time...
Yup some follow up news which I'm sure more of these instances will be happening... SHENZHEN, China (AP) — Questions mounted Tuesday about why leaders in southern China's most prominent manufacturing city didn't act to prevent the collapse of a mountain of construction waste that left 76 people missing. Also Tuesday, rescuers recovered a man's body in the first confirmed death from Sunday's mudslide at the construction dump site in Shenzhen. Still missing are 51 men and 25 women, Vice Mayor Liu Qingsheng told a news conference. He said the number had fallen as some people initially unaccounted for had gradually turned up. The Ministry of Land and Resources has said a steep man-made mountain of dirt, cement chunks and other construction waste had been piled up against a 100-meter (330-foot) -high hill over the past two years. Heavy rains saturated the soil, making it heavy and unstable, and ultimately causing it to collapse with massive force in and around an industrial park. State media reported that the New Guangming District government identified problems with the mountain of soil months earlier. The Legal Evening News said a district government report in January found that the dump had received 1 million cubic meters of waste and warned of a "catastrophe." Under pressure from the media, officials allowed about 30 journalists, mostly from foreign outlets, to approach an edge of the disaster area. Flanked by police, reporters could observe military posts with computers and disease control stations set up for the rescue workers. At the beginning of the news conference, Liu and other officials bowed to express their condolences for the victim that had been found. No questions from reporters were allowed.
What I find really telling is when things like this are reported, is the absolute avoidance of such threads by the new China cheering members that seem to have recently flooded the Chinese forum with examples of Chinese "excellence and superiority" LOL...
