Waste buries buildings in China, 91 missing

At least 91 people were missing after a giant mound of mud and construction waste spewed out of an overfull dump site in a southern China boomtown and buried 33 buildings in the country’s latest industrial disaster.

The site should have been closed down in February, but according to local workers, mud and waste had continued to be dumped there, a news portal run by the city government in Shenzhen said.

Premier Li Keqiang ordered an official investigation into Sunday’s landslide in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. The mudslide smashed into multistorey buildings at the Hengtaiyu industrial park in the city’s northwestern Guangming New District, toppling them within seconds in collisions that sent rivers of earth skyward.

Villager Peng Jinxin said the mud came like “huge waves”, as residents ran out of the way.

“At one point the running mud was only ten metres away from me,” Mr Peng told the official Xinhua news agency.

The frequency of industrial accidents in China has raised questions about safety standards following three decades of breakneck growth in the world’s

The site should have been closed down in February, but according to local workers, mud and waste had continued to be dumped there, a news portal run by the city government said

second- largest economy. Just four months ago, more than 160 people were killed in huge chemical blasts in the northern port city of Tianjin.

State television showed scenes of devastation in Shenzhen, with crumpled buildings sticking up from heaps of brown mud which stretched out across the industrial park.

Over a year ago, a governmentrun newspaper warned Shenzhen would run out of space to dump the waste left behind from a building frenzy.

Besides new buildings, a network of subway lines is being built in Shenzhen, and mounds of earth are being excavated and dumped at waste sites.

“Shenzhen has 12 waste sites and they can only hold out until next year,” the official Shenzhen “Evening Post, published by the city government, said in October, 2014.

Shenzhen was chosen by Beijing three decades ago to help pioneer landmark economic reforms.