Rescue workers are still hunting for
the missing
Posted on 06/13/2005 2:16:56 AM PDT by bd476
The death toll from a flash flood which hit a Chinese primary school on Friday has risen to 92, with more than a dozen people still missing. Eighty-eight of the dead were young children trapped in their classrooms when the waters surged.
Local officials in the town of Shalan, in Heilongjiang province, are being investigated for negligence, the official Xinhua news agency said.
In a separate disaster, a hotel fire killed 31 people in Guangdong.
The death toll from the Shalan flooding was expected to rise as officials were searching for at least 15 people still missing, 13 of them children.
More than 350 children between six and 14 years old were enrolled at the school, though it was not clear how many were attending when the waters hit.
The flooding was caused by very sudden and heavy rain, which a local water resources official said happened only once every 200 years.
But there have also been complaints that the village of Shalan and the school were built in a low-lying area prone to flooding, known as the Shalan ditch.
There have also been angry protests by local people who said their early appeals for help had been ignored, according to a BBC correspondent in Beijing.
Bodies floating
China's media has been reporting the first eye-witness accounts of the disaster and its aftermath.
Jia Yibo, father of one of the dead children, told China Daily that he arrived at the school to find 40 small bodies floating in waist-deep water.
Three children and a teacher were stranded on a window sill.
"My son was placed on a desk and the desk's surface was only a little higher than the water level," Jia said.
"His nose, ears and mouth were filled with mud and garbage, and when I touched him, I found he was dead," the paper quoted him as saying.
Xinhua said that Shalan's Communist Party and police chief were under investigation for negligence, amid allegations they failed to respond quickly enough to the disaster or organise a rescue operation.
An enquiry is also under way into the hotel fire, which swept through the top floors of a hotel in Shantou, a city in China's southern Guangdong province.
The official China Daily newspaper reported that firefighters were not called to the scene for 35 minutes, staff did not know how to inform guests or the fire brigade what was happening, and that the hotel had been decorated with flammable instead of flameproof materials.
June 13, 2005
Flooding caused by torrential rain struck Shalan Township of Ning'an in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province on Friday afternoon leaving at least 92 people dead, 89 of them students of one school. The death toll is expected to rise as head counting continues.
According to officials from a mortuary in Ning'an, 92 bodies had arrived by Sunday. Thirty more bodies were reported to have been sent to another funeral home 100 kilometres from Shalan Township.
Jia Yibo, father of one of the students killed, broke into Shalan Central Primary School to find 40 bodies floating in waist-deep water. Three children and a teacher were stranded on a window sill.
"My son was placed on a desk, and the desk's surface was only a little higher than the water level," Jia said.
"His nose, ears and mouth were filled with mud and garbage, and when I touched him, I found he was dead," said the devastated Jia.
He said he put his son's body across his shoulders and swam from the school, and only yesterday was his son taken to a funeral home.
By press time yesterday, 15 others remained missing, 13 of them students, the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) said, adding that 25 people (17 students, one child, five villagers, one teacher and one staff member of the school) had been hospitalized.
"So far, more than 10,000 people have been evacuated from the worst-hit areas and relief operations are in full swing," Fang Zhiyong, an MCA official, told China Daily.
Eighteen villages in Ning'an were affected by the flooding, three of which were severely hit. About 1,333 hectares of farmland have been devastated, 55 houses have collapsed and the lives of an estimated 1,800 villagers have been affected.
The flooding, triggered by 200 millimetres of torrential rainfall in only 40 minutes upstream of a local river, was the worst in 200 years.
A total of 352 students and 31 teachers at the school in Shalan Township were trapped under 2 metres of water on Friday afternoon as mountain torrents rushed down the local river and swept over the school.
Parents said sudden torrential rain battered Hesheng Village, some 10 kilometres northwest of Shalan, at mid-day on Friday. As a result, the local reservoir overflowed and, two hours later, the flood waters hit the lower-land school.
"The one-storey classrooms are at a lower level and the playground is even lower," said Dai Chunmei, whose 9- and 12-year-old nieces, Kong Lingyu and Kong Lingxue, were killed.
"The flood would not have killed so many children if the school was not located in such an unfortunate position," said Wang Limin, an armed police official from Mudanjiang, two hours and 40 minutes drive from Ning'an.
Wang and his colleagues arrived at the school at about 5:40 pm, three hours after the flood struck.
"The water level was about 3 metres at the highest places, only leaving the roofs above the surface," he said. "I could see some corpses floating on the water."
According to angry parents, the school, built decades ago, has been at risk of such an incident for a long time.
Even worse, parents said the only passage the flood could take to the south of the school was blocked by the teacher's buildings, meaning the school gate to the east was the only path open for the torrent.
According to Zhang Fengyan, a farmer whose son was killed, people from Hesheng Village had issued an urgent flood warning to the local government of Shalan Township before the waters arrived.
But officials did not take the warnings seriously.
"The next day was the Dragon Boat Festival, and leading officials had taken their holiday early," Zhang said.
The local Party and police chiefs of Shalan Township have been placed under investigation for negligence in the rescue operation, local sources said.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs has allocated 3 million yuan (US$361,000) for emergency relief efforts along with 400 tents, 2,700 sets of bedding and clothes and 30,000 kilograms of rice and flour stored locally for such a disaster.
The nation's flood-control authorities were said to have also earmarked 5 million yuan (US$610,000) for local flood relief.
A rescue team of 1,400 people, including 1,000 military personnel and 400 government officials, have arrived in the flood-ravaged town.
Seventeen medical experts from Harbin Medical College in the provincial capital have also been dispatched to the area, local rescue authorities said.
A temporary resident camp has been established to accommodate villagers who lost their homes in the flood and five food stations are now working to provide food for the displaced.
State Councillor Chen Zhili led a task force to the flood-hit area yesterday to direct relief work and offer condolences for the 92 people killed.
Song Fatang, Party secretary of Heilongjiang Province, and Zhang Zuoji, governor of Heilongjiang Province, have both arrived on the scene to help with the relief work.
Rescue teams are clearing the school and searches have been expanded in areas along the flooded rivers.
Source: China Daily
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