China rescuers look for landslide victims
At least 85 people remained missing Monday a day after a landslide struck 33 buildings in Shenzhen, a center for industry and manufacturing in southern China.
Hundreds of rescue workers scoured the area for survivors in the industrial park in the planned city created in 1980. It makes products used around the world, ranging from toys to cars to cheap technology devices.
The landslide was caused by a mountain of unstable dirt and construction debris that collapsed on the site on Sunday. Shenzhen is one of China's biggest cities with a population of more than 10 million and sits on the mainland directly across from Hong Kong.
The Shenzhen government said Monday that seven trapped people have been rescued and 16 others, including children, have been hospitalized, China's official Xinhua news agency reported. No deaths have been announced.
China's Ministry of Land and Resources said that the reason for the landslide was that a steep man-made mountain of dirt, cement chunks and other construction waste had been piled up against a 330-foot-high hill over the past two years. “The pile was too big, the pile was too steep, leading to instability and collapse,” the ministry said.
Some residents blamed local authorities for the accident.
“If the government had taken proper measures in the first place, we would not have had this problem,” Chen Chengli told the Associated Press.
“Heavy rains and a collapse of a mountain are natural disasters, but this wasn’t a natural disaster, this was man-made,” Chen's neighbor Yi Jimin told the AP.
Fourteen factories, two office buildings, one cafeteria, three dormitories and 13 sheds or workshops were damaged in the landslide, Shenzhen Deputy Mayor Liu Qingsheng said. The Ministry of Land and Resources said it used extra workers and experts to make sure a second collapse did not occur.
Including Sunday's landslide, China has seen at least four major disasters in the past 12 months. On New Year’s Eve, 36 revelers were killed in a deadly stampede in Shanghai, hundreds perished when a cruise ship in the Yangtze River capsized, and an explosion at a chemicals warehouse in Tianjin near Beijing killed 173 people.