33 buildings collapse in massive landslide in China

At least 22 people went missing after a landslide hit an industrial park collapsing almost 20 buildings, including two dormitories, on Sunday in Shenzhen city of south China’s Guangdong Province, rescuers said.

The country’s official news agency Xinhua says 59 men and 32 women are missing. Ten senior doctors from Guangzhou and Beijing are in Shenzhen to help. In the northeastern city of Tianjin, an explosion at a warehouse killed 173 people in August; the government said the hazardous-materials warehouse was located too close to nearby apartments in violation of regulations. All are in a stable condition.

Shenzhen Vice Mayor Liu Qingsheng told reporters, The mud had covered an area of more than 380,000 square metres (72,00 square yards) and was 10 metres deep in parts. Chinese media reported that the landslide caused an explosion at a natural gas pipeline and workers are still trying to clean the area and fix the damage.

Xinhua said the pipeline was owned by PetroChina, China’s top oil and gas producer, that the 400-meter-long ruptured pipe “has been emptied” and a temporary pipe will be built. Three people were injured and 27 remain missing after a landslide buried 22 residential and industrial buildings.

Rescuers sifted through hundreds of tonnes of mud from a crumbling mountain and debris from the buildings in one of China’s most developed cities, bordering Hong Kong.

They used cutting machines to dismantle the concrete structure after a large pit was dug.

“The rescue is extremely hard with mud and silt filling up the excavation”, it quoted firefighter Cui Bo as saying. “It’s the first time I have encountered a landslide of this nature on this scale in my 30-plus years in the field”.

A company based in Shenzhen that conducts site surveys had previously warned of dangers at the site, Chinese news outlets said.

“I saw red earth and mud running towards the company building”.

“They basically had all this earth left over from digging away at the little hills and they had no use for it, so they just left it there in a big heap”, the source, who gave only a surname Luo, said.

One weeping migrant worker told how he lost contact with 16 friends and family members after his home was buried.

The landslide occurred to a quarry-turned dumping site of construction waste. Its exact cause is as yet unknown.

Provincial authorities of Guangdong have sent in teams to investigate the matter. The massive landslide buried dozens of buildings when it swept through an industrial park in the southe…

The waste site that collapsed on the industrial estate was only supposed to have had a lifespan of around a year and should have stopped operating in February this year, according to the Shenzhen government’s online news portal.

The approval and management of the landslide-hit one is unclear. Shenzhen lacks the capacity to accommodate all of the waste.