Massive landslide leaves 91 missing

Over 30 buildings buried

SHENZHEN, China, Dec 21, (Agencies): Some 91 people were missing Monday after a huge landslide caused by illegal soil dumping buried more than 30 factory and residential buildings in a sea of mud, China’s second industrial disaster in four months.

Witnesses of the landslide late Sunday morning described a mass of red earth and mud racing towards an industrial park in the city of Shenzhen in “huge waves” before burying or crushing homes and factories, twisting some of them into grotesque shapes.

Drone footage showed chocolate-coloured mud had ploughed through and over buildings and tossed aside trucks like discarded toys.

One weeping migrant worker told how he lost contact with 16 friends or family members after his home was buried.

The landslide covers an area of 380,000 square meters — about 60 football fields — in many areas more than 10 meters thick, said Liu Qingsheng, the vice mayor of the city bordering Hong Kong, in a press conference Monday.

“It is the first time in China that we have seen a landslide on this scale,” said Liu Guonan of the China Academy of Railway Sciences.

“The soil on the slope is very high in water content so it’s hard to even walk across it — people’s feet sink into it,” he added.

Emergency

There were 91 people missing as of 9:00 am (0100 GMT) Monday, according to officials from the city’s emergency office cited by the Shenzhen Evening News.

The landslide was caused by the improper storage of waste soil from construction sites, according to the official newspaper of the Ministry of Land and Resources.

The soil was allegedly illegally stored in heaps 100 meters (330 feet) high at an old quarry site and turned to mud during heavy rain Sunday morning, the staterun Global Times reported.

Industrial accidents are common in China, with safety regulations often overlooked due to corruption. An explosion in August in the port city of Tianjin that killed nearly 200 people was blamed on improperly stored chemicals.

In the Shenzhen incident, about 900 people were moved out of harm’s way before the landslide struck. Four people have been rescued, of whom three had minor injuries.

Rescue operations were slowed by numerous obstacles, including continued rain, low visibility overnight, and mud, Ao Zhuoqian, a member of the city’s fire brigade, told the official Xinhua news agency.

“Seeing the scene now, of course I feel sad,” said Wen Yanchang, 28, who was amidst a group of around 100 people watching construction trucks start clearing the landslide.

“It’s unimaginable because I live near here but at the time I didn’t hear it happening,” he said.

Nearly 3,000 armed police and firefighters had been deployed to help with the rescue but “still had not made sizeable further progress”, a China National Radio report said.

Victims

A woman surnamed Hu told the Shenzhen Evening News Sunday that she saw her father buried by earth in his own truck.

Photos published by Xinhua showed victims wrapped in green blankets sleeping on mattresses and eating instant noodles.

He Weiming, a migrant worker at a temporary shelter, said he had lost contact with 16 friends and family members, including his parents, wife and two children, and had made dozens of phone calls to try to find them. All went unanswered.

“When my brother and I drove out in the morning to go collect garbage, our home was still fine, but when we came back ... the house had been buried in mud — you couldn’t even see the roof of our four-metre-high sheet metal house,” he told an online news site run by Tencent — weeping and flipping through photos of his children on his cellphone.

“There are many other homes around mine — I don’t know if others escaped.”

The slide ruptured a natural gas pipeline and triggered an explosion heard about four kilometres (2.5 miles) away, Xinhua said.

Nearby gas stations have stopped supplying the pipeline and no gas leaks have been found, the Global Times cited the local fire department as saying.

A landslide last month that engulfed 27 homes in rural Zhejiang province killed 38 people.

Some area residents blamed government negligence for the disaster. “If the government had taken proper measures in the first place, we would not have had this problem,” said one of the residents, Chen Chengli. “We’ve been down this road before, it’s too crazy.”

Chen’s neighbor Yi Jimin refuted arguments that the landslide was an act of nature.

“Heavy rains and a collapse of a mountain are natural disasters, but this wasn’t a natural disaster, this was man-made,” Yi said.

A man who runs a store selling cigarettes and alcohol less than a kilometer (half-mile) from the site said locals had known that the pile of soil was dangerous and feared something bad would happen.

“We heard a sound like an explosion and then all we saw was smoke,” said the man, who gave only his surname, Dong. “We knew what had happened immediately.”