91 people are missing after landslide in China

Photo taken on December 21, 2015 shows the landslide site of an industrial park in Shenzhen, south China’s Guangdong Province. The massive landslide buried doze…

State television showed devastation in Shenzhen, with bits of broken buildings sticking up from heaps of mud stretching out over the industrial park.

At a morning briefing Monday, emergency officials declined to identify a cause for the accident. Almost twelve months later, a mountain of excavated soil and construction waste collapsed into…

Shenzhen media has reported several times in the past few years that companies were illegally dumping construction waste as the legal dumps were all full.

A wall of mud smashed into multi-storey buildings at the Hengtaiyu industrial park in the city’s north-western Guangming New District on Sunday morning, toppling them in collisions that sent rivers of earth skyward. Some residents have blamed government negligence for allowing the giant debris pile to build up, while questions have been raised about the weaknesses of the factories and dormitories that crumbled under the landslide.

The landslide covered 380,000 square meters in silt 10 meters deep, said Liu Qingsheng, deputy mayor of Shenzhen, at a press conference on Monday.

“I saw red earth and mud running towards the company building”, one local worker was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

Fourteen people have been rescued, said officials. Seven people were reportedly pulled from the rubble as hundreds of rescue workers continued to look for survivors in Guangdong province’s Shenzhen city Monday.

About 900 were evacuated as the landslide struck on Sunday.

Human error has been suspected or confirmed in all three previous disasters, pointing to an often callous attitude toward safety despite the threat of harsh penalties.

“Because the mound was very large, and the angle of its slope was overly steep, this led to it losing stability and collapsing”, it said. “Now that Shenzhen has this problem, you can’t rule out a lot of other places having such risks”, Mr Fan said.

Chen’s neighbor, Yi Jimin, said the disaster wasn’t an act of nature.

Posts on the microblog said mud had thoroughly infused numerous buildings, leaving the “room of survival extremely small”.

“We didn’t realise this could happen”.

The Ministry of Land and Resources has claimed to have provided additional personnel to assist with the containment of the debris and keep guard in case of a second collapse.

13 people are being treated in hospital – three are critically ill.

“Seeing the scene now, of course I feel sad”, said Wen Yanchang, 28, who was amidst a group of around 100 people watching construction trucks start clearing the landslide.