Questions mount over why officials didn’t act to prevent China mudslide; 76

Nearly 72 hours after being buried alive by a tide of earth and rubble, 19-year-old Tian Zeming was pulled from the soil by emergency workers who have been battling around the clock in the search for survivors.

Rescuers and armed police identified the exact location of Tian at 1 a.m. on Wednesday, and found him at 3:30 a.m.

Aerial photos on the microblog of the Public Security Ministry’s Firefighting Bureau showed the area awash in a sea of red mud, with several buildings either knocked on their side or collapsed entirely.

On Tuesday, Xinhua said the body was discovered around 06:00 local time (22:00 GMT Monday), but didn’t give additional details on the individual’s identity.

Angry survivors and relatives of people that are still missing have criticised a five-hour suspension to rescue efforts following the deadly landslide on the outskirts of Shenzhen, as the body of the first victim was recovered early on Tuesday morning. Xinhua said 14 people had been rescued and more than 900 people had been evacuated from the site by Sunday evening.

There were still 81 people unaccounted for at the landslide site in Shenzhen, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

There are as many as 73 more people reported missing, according to CNN’s calculations based on Chinese media reports.

The slide ruptured a natural gas pipeline and triggered an explosion heard about four kilometres away, Xinhua said.

The landslide eventually blanketed a vast area of 380,000 sq m (455,000 sq yards) – the equivalent of about 50 football fields.

An unnamed worker remembered the moment, telling the Daily, “suddenly, the lights in our factory went out, and we all ran out to see what had happened…”

In Sunday’s landslide, the Ministry of Land and Resources said a steep man-made mountain of dirt, cement chunks and other construction waste had been piled up against a 100-meter (330-foot)-high hill over the past two years.

Documents on the web site of Guangming New District, where the landslide occurred, show that authorities were aware of problems with the storage and had urged action as early as this July.

A central government meeting in Beijing overseen by President Xi Jinping that ended Tuesday said safety should be the “first priority” in China’s city development and management, Xinhua news agency said.

The frequency of industrial accidents has raised questions about safety standards in China after three decades of breakneck growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

A building collapses in Shenzhen.