China landslide: 91 missing in Shenzhen as mudslide buries 33 buildings

Police received the report of the landslide at 11:40am, which took place in the Liuxi Industrial Park in Guangming New District in northwest part of the city.

State television said that of the 91 missing, 59 were men and 32 women. Details are beginning to emerge about the cause of the landslide, which authorities say covered an area of 100,000 square meters with up to 6 meters (20 feet) of mud.

“They are still digging, but in my heart I know that there’s no hope”, Ye Shiming, a factory worker searching for three of her children and her father-in-law, told The Wall Street Journal. It stated the steep, man-made mountain of dirt, cement chunks & different construction waste in that had been piled up against a 330-foot-high hill over the past two years of time of time.

An evacuee rests in a shelter set up at a gymnasium near the industrial park hit by a landslide in Shenzhen. Seven people are believed to have been killed.

The Chinese government ordered immediate rescue efforts following the landslide in Shenzhen, a city in Guangdong province.

The Cross-border Environment Concern Association, a Hong Kong-Guangdong non-governmental green group, said the site operated illegally from 2013 until it was granted an environmental permit in February.

A statement on Weibo, China’s micro-blogging site akin to Twitter, from the Shenzhen municipal government said the landslide also triggered an explosion at a nearby gas station. According to local media, local businesses had been warned about the dangers of soil erosion at the site back in January via an environmental-impact report released by Shenzhen-based company Zongxing Environmental Technology, The New York Times report. A local state-run newspaper, the Shenzhen Evening Post, pointed out a year ago that the nine existing dump sites were far from enough. Nearly 3,000 rescuers were at the scene, it said, with sniffer dogs and drones.

The frequency of industrial accidents in China has raised questions about safety standards following three decades of breakneck growth in the world’s second-largest economy. Rescuers were focusing on several areas where sensors had detected signs of life, it added.

A migrant worker by the name of He Weiming from the Henan Province, informed local media that many of his relatives were buried in the rubble caused by the landslide.

Hundreds of rescue workers scoured the area for survivors in the industrial park in the planned city created in 1980.

The 33 damaged or collapsed buildings included 14 factories, two office buildings, three dormitories, 13 sheds or workshops and a cafeteria, Shenzhen Deputy Mayor Liu Qingsheng (劉慶生) said at a news conference. But the pipeline’s operator, China National Petroleum Corp., later said there had been no explosion, and that it had emptied natural gas from a small pipeline segment near the landslide for safety reasons.

About 900 were evacuated as the landslide struck yesterday.