Bridge collapses in China, 22 deaths

Too many bridges falling these days...


BEIJING (Reuters) - A road bridge on the verge of completion in China has collapsed, killing 22 people and injuring 22 in a possible indication of safety standards ridden rough-shod in the face of breakneck economic development.

At least 39 people were missing after the 320-metre (1,000-ft) bridge spanning the Tuo river in Fenghuang county, in the southeastern province of Hunan, collapsed on Monday during the evening rush hour, even as workers were stripping it of scaffolding, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.

Pictures on state-run China Central Television showed bulldozers and rescue workers picking through a massive pile of debris stretching between two hills at the banks of the river, which flows through a scenic area popular with tourists in western Hunan.

"A lot of women and children were ... crying and looking for their families or friends," he added.

Xinhua quoted an unnamed worker and witness at a nearby tourist site. "I heard the sounds of the crash and before I could realize what was happening, I saw the bridge fall slowly and become a pile of rocks," he was quoted as saying.

Tian Jing, a 29-year-old construction worker on the bridge, said three men from his home village were buried in the debris.

At least 123 workers were at the site of the arched concrete bridge, which was to have been completed this month, Xinhua said. "Fifty-six or more" workers were on the 42-metre-high (138-foot) bridge itself when it collapsed, the State Administration of Work Safety said on its Web site.

The collapse had cut off a highway linking Fenghuang county to an airport in neighboring Guizhou province's Tongren region, a notice posted on the local government Web site said.

Police had detained a construction manager and a "project supervisor" for questioning, Xinhua said, but the cause of the accident was still under investigation.

An editorial in the official China Daily on Tuesday warned that thousands of the country's bridges were unsafe.

"If left unrepaired these bridges may crumble at any time, wreaking economic havoc and possibly claiming human lives," it said.

The bridge disaster occurred days after the death toll from the Interstate 35W bridge's August 1 collapse into the Mississippi River in Minneapolis was raised to nine.

Some 400 police had been sent to the scene to keep order and more than 1,000 rescue workers were searching for the missing, Xinhua said.

"I saw a lot of bodies lying on the road, some of them were construction workers, and some were passers-by ... blood was everywhere," witness Yang Shunzhong told Reuters.

"A car was crushed flat under the bridge, it was so ruined that I could not even tell (its) size."

Workplace accidents sites are rife in booming China, where patchy safety enforcement and corner-cutting by contractors result in the deaths of thousands in the country's coal mines, factories and building sites every year.

The collapse came as state media reported that China would fix more than 6,000 damaged or dangerous bridges across the country. A bridge collapse in June in southern Guangdong province killed nine people.

TOLL EXPECTED TO RISE

CCTV reported the death toll at 22, but Yang said police had told him they had found 60 bodies and that "people on the scene" said the toll could rise much higher.

Not really sure what to say other than that it's a tragedy and that I hope the families of the victims along with the survivors get the help they need.

It's already the second bridge collapses in China this summer. The first one is still under the investigation. Really don't know what to say, other than feel sorry for the victims.

Pictures of the bridge collaspe..My condolences to the famlies that lost loved ones...The scary part ,if I'm not mistaken, is that the bridge was brand new. .

What was going on that caused the piers themselves to come down? Something doesn't make sense there.

22 dead and 39 missing, and I take it that that was all or mostly construction crew. Very sad, very needless. There seems to be some serious systemic problems somewhere in the economy if all sorts of things from pet food to toys to bridges suffer all sorts of very serious problems.

That said, I think something of a bandwagon effect has taken hold with the reporting of such events in China. I suspect that when we were less directly affected by these sorts of issues (importing Chinese manufactures), we didn't care as much when these things did happen over there. Tragic.

Southern China has been another area that has endured an incredibly Wet summer. I am beginning to wonder whether or not we are seeing the effects of deep ground saturation and the ground on which the Piers were constructed simply losing both its material and structural strength as a result.

Bridges falling down are big news, but individual homes and other structures probably are not, so we do not get to build a context for any of this.

Had there been a lot of rainfall in the area of the US Collapse?

It may mean having to under pin and deeper pile a great many structures.

Well rain, even a heavy rain doesen't have that sort of effect to the soiltypes usually used in the structural (land) layers bellow the piers. Rough materials like sand, gravel or rockgrain (don't know the exact english word, but a artificially made very large diameter gravel) have actually quite opposite effect when wetting. The water fills the small spongy-like sections in the soil and while going down becouse of gravity, the sponge-structure breaks down and the soil becomes more tenser.

Floods and other abnormal waterphenomenals tough may have another type of effects...

When I was a just a little boy about late 80s, a near completion bright collapsed and killed at least 50 people in my little city of Sichuan Province Southeast China. Tragedy like this just happens over over again.

Interesting tough bit cynical info from the accident have emerged. Back when the bridge collapsed in USA, some members were boasting about chinese steelproduction capabilities and that particular construction materials alledged poor standarts in USA. Well now there's been rumours that the bridge that collapsed in china was build without using steel at all, only concrete and rocks!!
This is alarming and speculations in here have started to pop out wheter the rabid modernisation and economical growth is done in the expense in quality and very basic safety principles. Tough the outrageous of this nedgelence speaks more of induvidual mistake than of more general proplem...or at least I hope so

Wow you interpreted the posts in other thread in that way? I don't know about steel or cement production in the US but you do in fact hear in the US, and I live in the US, complaining about how China is forcing the price of steel and cement up because most of it is shipped to China. I live in the Bay Area where they're building the new Bay Bridge. The price of steel has gone so high in the US that the budget of the Bay Bridge has at least doubled since original estimates and we're talking billions. So they are in fact looking to China for steel if the people of the state of California don't want to pay that high of a price for a bridge.

Like I mentioned in the other thread, bridges collapsing seems to happen frequently around the world without getting a lot of press. Bridges collapsing in China seems to get a lot more attention in the West. I just read in another forum on world architecture where posters, guess where they're coming from, laughing about the bridge collapsing and the fire at the Shanghai World Financial Center Tower.