Landslide in China sends hundreds fleeing
HONG KONG — A landslide in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen sent a sea of earth crashing into an industrial district on Sunday morning, sending hundreds of people fleeing for their lives and destroying at least 22 buildings, the local government said.
At least 27 people were unaccounted for and about 1,500 rescue workers were on the scene looking for people under the rubble, according to a report on the official page of the Guangming New District government on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media site.
Images and video on social media showed a flood of dirt engulfing low-rise buildings and upending construction vehicles as if they were toy cars. At least four people had been pulled from the rubble, three of whom had minor injuries, the local government said. Some of the collapsed buildings were residential, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
China’s governmentcontrolled media placed emphasis on the concern felt by officials, including President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. Both men were monitoring the situation and had dispatched a team from the country’s cabinet to the scene, Xinhua reported.
The expressions of concern by China’s top two officials appeared to reflect a newfound sensitivity after a series of deadly accidents highlighted the downside of the nation’s breakneck economic growth.
What was left largely unsaid in official reports was the potential cause of the landslide. A report from sina.com, an online news portal, said that an illegal man-made pile of earth, deposited on the side of a hill, had collapsed.
The Weibo page of a local official newspaper reported that the giant pile of construction debris and earth was illegal and that it had been approved by local officials. Those posts were later deleted.
In China, public criticism over lax government regulations and corruption has grown recently after several disasters.
In August, a chemical storage depot exploded in the northern port city of Tianjin, killing more than 170 people. In October, a building collapsed in the central province of Henan, killing at least 17 construction workers. A landslide in May in southwestern China’s Guizhou province caused a nine-story building to collapse, killing 16.
The 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, which left more than 87,000 people dead or missing, brought national attention to the shoddy construction standards of buildings.