SOH News

Breaking News – Students killed in dangerously constructed buildings

In the recent Sichuan earthquake, the largest number of deaths and injuries took place inside schools. The schools buildings constructed with cheap materials could not withstand the shock, thus parents of victims face the ultimate grief.
In Wufu district, Fuxin township of Sichuan’s Mianju city, almost all buildings remained unscathed, except for buildings in the Fuxiner Primary School which collapsed. Currently 300 students are still buried under rubble, and 137 have already been found dead. On the 20th of May, parents of victims condemned local government officials for being irresponsible. The steel frames inside the walls of school buildings, which should have been strong and rigid, were found to be soft and as brittle as fence wire. The fact of this matter has been a hard blow for parents, who held memorial services and wept for their children, with photographs in hand.

13 year old Tanlong was one of the few lucky survivors of the disaster, who still felt shaken with recollections of the ordeal. (Recording) I jumped from the school building and ran for the gate, then I saw the whole building collapse, a lot of my peers were buried in concrete and tiles.” According to parents who were in the process of excavating rubble by hand, frantically searching for their own children, government officials knew long ago, of the substandard constructions in the  school. They said buildings in schools completely collapsed within seconds of the quake, just like “a piece of paper”.

Xu Jun, a parent who tragically lost his 13 year old child in the disaster said, “At the time everyone arrived at the scene, and with bare fists, we removed every brick, we did not have any mechanical tools.”While they pointed to the piles of ruins, parents exposed the concrete used to construct schools were of brittle quality, and cheap bricks connected by the concrete formed walls, and could fall over with the push of one hand. The construction was clearly of inferior quality.

Close to 200 parents wrote the names of their deceased children on white cloth, in their own blood.
When parents saw a local government official who remained silent while he passed the school gates, their emotions became heightened. Shortly after, this government official was requested by parents to attend memorial services, and surrounded by parents who demanded satisfactory explanations for the collapsed school buildings. According to these parents, he was the first government official to arrive at the scene, after more than one week of the earthquake.
Residents of the Wufu district expressed, it was apparent that the local government did not make reports of the number of casualties from the collapsed school buildings.

The above was brought to you by Yu Lian for Breaking News on SOH Radio Network.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites