SHANGHAI, May 9 (Xinhua) -- Two construction workers were killed and six more injured Saturday after the collapse of a plastic factory workshop in Shanghai, police said.
The workshop under construction fell down at around 5 p.m. in the Pudong New Area, reduced to more than 300 square meters of debris.
Two workers died in hospital. Of the six injured, three were in critical condition.
Police investigation is underway.
Special Report:Reconstruction After Earthquake
CHENGDU, May 8 (Xinhua) -- A local construction official said Friday that
all school buildings being rebuilt in Chengdu, capital of southwest Sichuan
Province, would be "high-quality" and quake-proof.
Huang Ping, director of the Chengdu Construction Commission, told a press
conference that the designs for new school buildings were all up to national
quake-resistance standards and the province would spare no effort to build
high-quality schools.
China announced Thursday that 5,335 students had been confirmed killed or
missing in Sichuan after the 8.0 earthquake struck May 12 last year.
Statistics from the provincial education department showed that 3,340
schools needed to be rebuilt after the earthquake.
After the quake, China's national legislature amended the Law on
Precautions Against Earthquake and Relief of Disaster last year, which said
schools and hospitals must be designed to stand strong earthquakes. School
buildings should withstand quakes of at least 8.0. The new law took effect last
Friday.
The official said experts had been sent to foreign countries such as Japan
to learn useful techniques in rebuilding quake-proof schools.
The official said the cost to build one local school, a project that
Shanghai aided, had exceeded 4,000 yuan (586.36 U.S. dollars) per square meter,
the same price of local commercial apartment buildings.
Farmers had been urged to stop building their own houses, which failed to
meet construction standards, Huang said.
The central government had allocated 220.3 billion yuan to Sichuan to help
reconstruction, and provincial and grassroots financial authorities planned to
contribute another 41.2 billion yuan, according to Liu Jie, director of the
Sichuan Provincial Development and Reform Commission, the provincial economic
planning body.
Yu Wei, spokesman of the provincial government, said Thursday that the
speed of construction in urban areas lagged behind that of rural areas in the
province. He did not give any reason.
Reconstruction of rural housing was scheduled to be finished before
September, while the target for urban buildings was next May, he said.
He said the province would try to speed up construction in urban areas by
offering subsidies and providing technical support.
Special Report:Reconstruction After Earthquake
BEIJING, May 7 -- The construction of schools must be safe, reliable
and closely supervised, according to a State Council circular issued ahead of
the one-year anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake.
Construction authorities have been ordered to
strengthen safety controls and provide technical support in the building and
reconstruction of all school projects.
It said there would be severe punishment for those
found engaged in illegal practices.
"The quality of school buildings is a concern of
social stability and should be the focus of local authorities at present and in
the coming days," it said.
It comes as the nation prepares to mark the May 12
anniversary of the 8-magnitude earthquake in which many students were killed and
buried under collapsed school buildings.
According to the latest Sichuan provincial
construction authority statistics, a total floor area of 1.997 million sq m of
school buildings collapsed, accounting for 1.3 percent of the total collapsed
floor space.
Since that time, the construction quality of school
buildings has been a major cause of public concern.
A nationwide campaign was launched last June to test
all school buildings and find those with problems that might endanger students.
"It is what the government should have done long
ago," said Wang Yingchao, mother of a 13-year-old girl, in Beijing.
"A circular may not be enough to curb the quality
problems in school building, and there should be strict punishment for those in
breach of the rules," a netizen from Changzhou, Jiangsu province, wrote on news
portal sina.com.cn.
Yesterday, Shanghai-based Oriental Outlook quoted Liu
Zuoming, head of Sichuan provincial justice department, as saying that he did
not support investigating who was responsible for any building collapses.
The collapse should be partly blamed on inadequate
earthquake-proof construction standards for buildings, he said. It cannot be the
responsibility of a sole individual, he added.
An online survey of 12,000 netizens found 90.4
percent did not agree with Liu and wanted people engaged in substandard
construction practices to be severely punished.
Only 7.5 percent of those surveyed supported Liu,
saying human failure played little role in the devastating earthquake.
Deputy Sichuan governor Wei Hong said the unusual
earthquake was the fundamental reason for damaging a large number of public
buildings.
Sichuan is planning to rebuild 9,145 schools, 90 percent of which will complete by the end of this year.
(Source: China Daily)
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