One survivor rescued 60 hours after China landslide

Rescuers work…at the site of a landslide that hit an industrial park in Shenzhen, in south China’s Guangdong province.

A teen-aged boy has been pulled out alive Wednesday after being buried for about 67 hours in debris following Sunday’s landslide in China’s southeastern city of Shenzhen, Guangdong province.

Rao Liangzhong of the Shenzhen Emergency Response Workplace stated in that the person, Tian Zeming, was rescued around dawn on Wednesday. Authorities blamed an enormous, man-made mountain of soil and waste for the collapse of almost three dozen buildings that left 81 people missing in southern China’s most prominent manufacturing city.

In an announcement dated July 10, officials said that work at the site was not being carried out according to approved plans and ordered the Hongao Construction Waste Dump to “speed up” work to bring its operations into line. A Chinese news report said a deputy general manager had been taken away by police. “There is no guarantee for our lives”.

Little Hong’s elder brother described how he called his father repeatedly, until his cell phone battery went flat. The Shenzhen government did not respond to a request for comment. “There is no power supply now”. Yao Yingzheng, a firefighter who participated in pulling out the first victim, said, “We detected vital signs several times, but our utmost efforts were in vain”. In September, local district authorities said on an official website the dump was not supposed to take any more waste and that guards were meant to have been posted to prevent illegal dumping of mud.

Aerial photos from the microblog of the Public Security Ministry’s Firefighting Bureau showed the area awash in a sea of red mud, with buildings either knocked on their side or collapsed entirely. According to The Journal, preliminary findings by geological experts are that the construction debris had been piled too high and had become unstable, although officials have not officially confirmed that claim.

Although the Chinese government has instituted formal initiatives to curb the occurrences and consequences of natural disasters, issues of landslides, catastrophic earthquakes and chemical explosions have still posed a drastic threat throughout much of 2015, especially for the majority of Chinese now living in urban centers.