Bridge collapse in China kills at least 22

The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 14, 2007

BEIJING: A bridge being built as a tourist attraction in central China has collapsed, killing at least 28 people, injuring 22 and leaving dozens missing, China Central Television reported Tuesday, but witnesses expected the death toll to rise substantially.

The official Xinhua press agency said that 86 people were rescued, including the 22 who were injured when the 320-meter, or 1,050-foot, bridge spanning the Tuo River in Hunan Province collapsed Monday. The cause of the collapse was under investigation, it said.

The 43-meter-high bridge in Fenghuang County had four decorative stone arches and was scheduled to open at the end of this month, Xinhua said. It collapsed as workers were removing scaffolding from its facade, it said.

CCTV showed bulldozers plowing through the rubble, overturning chunks of stone and concrete mixed in a tangle of steel reinforcement bars.

Xinhua said the governor of Hunan, Zhou Qiang, was at the scene overseeing rescue efforts. Most of the people working on the bridge were local farmers, the agency said.

"I was riding a bike with my husband, and we had just passed under the bridge and were about 50 meters away when it collapsed," said a witness, who would only gave her surname, Wu.

Another witness, Yang Shunzhong, said: "I saw a lot of bodies lying on the road; some of them were construction workers, and some were passers-by."

Xinhua said 123 workers were at the site of the bridge, which had been scheduled for completion this month. They had been "dismantling steel scaffolding erected during the construction process" at the bridge since mid-July, it added.

Xinhua said the bridge was built by Fengda, a company based in western Hunan, at a cost of 12 million yuan, or $1.58 million. It said the contractor was the provincial Road and Bridge Construction, or RBC.

The RBC construction manager, Xia Youjia, and project supervisor, Jiang Ping, had been detained for questioning, Xinhua reported.

Part of the bridge collapsed across a highway linking Fenghuang County to an airport in the Tongren region of neighboring Guizhou Province, according to a notice posted on the local government Web site on Tuesday.

In its annual report on road safety last year, the Ministry of Communications categorized 6,300 bridges as dangerous because of serious damage to structural components, The China Daily reported Tuesday.

[Taxes must not be high enough to maintain the Chinese infrastructure. That's the ticket!]