Officials: China orders probe of school collapses in quake

www.chinaview.cn [Xinhua] ^ | 2008-05-16

[brityank]

Officials: China orders probe of school collapses in quake

BEIJING, May 16 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has ordered local authorities to investigate the reasons why school buildings collapsed in the earthquake, said Yang Rong, director of the ministry's department of standards and norms, in an online interview on Friday.

    "If quality problems do exist in the school buildings, we will deal with the persons responsible strictly with no toleration and give the public a satisfying answer," said Han Jin, head of the development and plan department of the Ministry of Education in the interview.

Rescuers clean out the debris pressing on a trapped middle school student Yang Hong in quake-striken Beichuan County, southwest China's Sichuan Province, May 15, 2008. Trapped for nearly 60 hours, the Junior third grade student Yang Hong of Beichuan Middle School was finally rescued around the zero hour of May 15. His left foot was fractured, while mind remained fully conscious. (Xinhua/Chen Faliang)
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    "Our top priority at present is to save lives, but investigations into construction quality will also be launched," Han replied to online questions.

    The 7.8-magnitude quake that struck southwest China's Sichuan Province on Monday was known to have destroyed 216,000 structures in the province, including 6,898 school buildings, as of Wednesday, according to incomplete calculations, said Han.

    Accurate data is yet to come out, as damage has not been calculated in some of the most badly-hit regions such as Wenchuan County, the epicenter, and Beichuan County, he said.

    The quake hit at 2:28 p.m., when students were in class, leading to relatively severe fatalities among teachers and students, said Han.

    "We want to express our deepest condolences to the teachers and students who lost their precious lives in the quake," he said.

    The government would take the responsibility of rebuilding quake-stricken primary and high schools, while those deep in the countryside would be provided with operating expenses and salaries for teachers, said Han.

    The reason for the collapse of buildings, including schools, would be thoroughly probed and analyzed, as the force of the quake had far exceeded the anticipated degree on which the government established quake-resistance standards for buildings in those areas, said Yang.

Soldiers remove floor slabs during a rescue operation for pupils at the collapsed Jinhua Town Primary School in the quake-hit Jinhua Town of Mianzhu City, southwest China's Sichuan Province, May 15, 2008. (Xinhua/Liu Zheng) 
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    He said China had clear requirements on seismic-resistant designs for buildings in primary and high schools.

    Whether to raise the standard would be considered after rechecking the local quake intensity and investigating the damage, said Yang, adding that the latest scientific research and China's economic and social situation would also be taken into account.

    The quality of school buildings came under the spotlight as reports showed hundreds of students had been buried under crushed schools after the quake.

    Juyuan Middle School, located in an obscure town in Dujiangyan City neighboring Wenchuan, saw about 900 students and teachers buried when its school building collapsed in Monday's quake, and more than 60 were confirmed dead by Tuesday.

    As of 12 p.m. Thursday, 360 students had been rescued from the ruins of the Beichuan Middle School in the Beichuan County, with another 700 more still buried under ruins of the school's main building.

    The issue of collapsed school buildings received most attention from Internet users during Friday's interview.

    There were no national figures of casualties in schools yet.

    The Ministry of Education has told jolted schools to suspend classes according to local needs and, together with the Ministry of Finance, allocated an emergency fund of 50 million yuan (7.14 U.S. dollars) to assist teachers and students.

    "The government has always highly valued the work to improve anti-quake standards for construction projects," said Yang.

    China has upgraded its quake-resistant standards of buildings seven times since the 1950s, said Yang. They included two major revisions after a 7.8-magnitude quake in 1976 and a series of jolts, with the largest one measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale, in 1966 in north China.

    China now has 48 special standards for houses, urban infrastructure, railways, roads, power grids, water conservancy works and other projects for the purpose of protecting them from quake damages, according to Yang.

    The worst quake in three decades in China had killed 19,509 people by 4 p.m. Thursday as official data show, while more than 50,000 were feared dead.

    Yang urged people in quake regions to stay away from buildings judged as dangerous or structures whose situation was unclear in case of aftershocks.

    Experts have been dispatched to help appraise the injuries of buildings that were not completely damaged in the jolt, said Yang.

[TigersEye]

Alrighty then. You basically admitted a few posts back that you were stirring the pot. "Glad to see there can still be some non-politically correct debate stirred on FR" Now that I know that I feel a lot less inclined to jump on your back. It's not like I never take a stick and rattle it around in a hornet's nest to see what happens. lol I'm sorry if I got a little too nasty about it.

No matter what the accepted codes were, obviously there's some level of disaster/load whatever beyond which any structure/plan will fail. So there's a trade-off made everywhere as to cost and expected worst-case attack on the design.

That is something I have been thinking all along when criticisms of the building codes etc, and rescue efforts have been made. They are now saying it was an 8.0 earthquake. At some point the intensity of a quake is so big that no structure at all could survive intact. 8.0 is pretty close to that threshold if I'm not mistaken. As you say, there is a trade off point where spending more money for increased quake resistance doesn't make sense. They built to resist up to 5.0. Perhaps too low for this region. But the added cost to build to resist a 7.0 would be very high and an then an 8.0 or higher happens and the economic loss of that high dollar infrastructure makes the disaster even more costly.

Your points about employing the wisdom of standard building codes, developed from decades of experience, is a good one. But I think it is still unknown that shoddy building practices were at fault here for any of the damage.

As for lack of equipment; I saw a lot of it in the pictures I linked to some posts back and in other picture files. Most of it was a lot bigger than any farm/ranch equipment yet it was still dwarfed by the jobs they faced.

[sam_paine]

lol. No harm no foul. I am used to taking a LOT of heat on some of the daily “China is taking over the world tomorrow” threads.

I’m the contrarian on those threads, as I subscribe to the “million man swim” limitation theory of China’s lack of force projection in naval and air superiority.

Yes they have a huge army, and yes they have made lots of technical progress (By hook or by crook)...and even we have done our best to cede our leads in various bungles here and there.

But China’s scale has massive vulnerabilities as well. They are just as human as we are, and they are constrained by an even worse government than our own, if you can imagine that!

Tragedies like this are a big reminder that choices made by our forefathers matter a great deal today, and we’re more lucky than most around the world for who was making the decisions in America’s past.

[TigersEye]

Jumping into a fray with a minority POV sounds too much like me for me to criticize. lol

I think I'd take your side re Chinese force projection. Under the well crafted facade of unity the PRC tries to sell China is a major basket case.

[brityank]

I apologize for misreading your comments.

I did see a couple of quick stories (not in the CCP press) where some of the businesses and folks there who had equipment were on the move long before the PLA was even alerted. However, the scope of the damage, and the vast area they were covering was akin to moving a mountain with a single shovel. The CCP and PLA now have two debacles they have failed their countrymen for, the snowstorm and this; in neither case did they do as much as soon as they should have, or as much as they claimed they were positioned to do. Most of the immediate help came from the stricken area, it was more than a day before those from outside even started to try to get in to assess and help.

I pinged you to a story out of Forbes; one of the points that is made there is the newer generation in China, like us, is using technology to bypass the strict information blockades that the CCP and PLA would dearly love to keep in place. I do believe that socialism will fail, as it did in Russia and the Baltics, once they find how much better freedom and open trade works to their benefit and growth. We, at FR can help in that openness, as long as we allow them the same privilege of supporting their country as we do -- not the government, as my tag-line shows!       ;^)