20 dead after buildings built by villagers collapse
Print Edition
A SERIES of multi-story buildings built by local villagers and packed with migrant workers collapsed in east China’s Zhejiang Province yesterday, killing at least 20 people, the local government said.
The four residential buildings caved in during the early hours in the port city of Wenzhou’s Lucheng industrial district, the district government said in a social media posting.
By late last night, 20 people had been confirmed dead and six others rescued, it said. The announcement gave no indication of how many people were still missing.
The latest survivor was a young girl who was rescued at 6:45pm. She had been protected by the bodies of her parents, who were killed in the collapse.
She has been sent to a local hospital, firefighters said.
Rescuers said the collapsed buildings had been built by villagers and five adjacent houses built in the 1970s remained standing. However, rescuers were demolishing them to avoid secondary disasters. Residents who live around the collapse site have been relocated to safe places, according to rescuers.
Rescuers were last night still trying to verify the number of people trapped under the debris.
“To protect those who are trapped, we are mainly digging with our bare hands so that work is going slowly,” fire department officer Sun Jing said.
Yan Yongfa, a 57-year-old migrant worker, said each room housed at least two to three people. Yan said he lived with four other workers in a room rented for them by their boss.
Hundreds of millions of people have moved from countryside to towns and cities in recent decades, their labor fueling the economic boom. But many remain poorly paid and face restrictions on buying homes in the areas where they are working.
China has seen several building collapses in recent years, with some of them blamed on low-quality construction.
In May, 16 people were reported dead after a residential building in southwest China’s Guizhou Province collapsed due to landslides.
In April, two people were killed and 24 injured when a storm brought down a wholesale market building in Foshan in the southern province of Guangdong.
(AFP/Xinhua)
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