Man found buried alive more than 60 hours after China landslide

A teenager has been rescued from a landslide after spending 60 hours under the rubble in Shenzhen, China.

Tian had been “fortunate to escape with his life’ after the building’s walls held firm, officials said”.

A damaged cement mixer truck is seen in the industrial park hit by a landslide in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, December 23, 2015.

The force of the landslide destroyed 33 buildings in its path. Initially, there were over 90 people that were reported missing.

The tragedy happened near the border with Hong Kong when a huge man-made mound of earth and construction waste collapsed after heavy rains.

The state news agency Xinhua said the survivor told the soldiers who rescued him that there was another survivor nearby.

Hospital boss Wang Guangming said Mr Tian is in stable condition, but extremely weak, dehydrated and with several soft tissue injuries and multiple fractures, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

(Translated) “We found the survivor around 2 to 3 a.m., and I didn’t remember how long did it take us to rescue him as I was operating the rescue working under the debris”. “Some were lucky enough to be pushed out by the impact of the landslide, but others were buried under the mud”.

The search teams who found Tian worked in a confined space and removed the debris by hand, one rescuer revealed.

The government has pledged an investigation into the disaster, after documents posted on the city’s web site showed that authorities had issued repeated warnings about the problem.

“We never thought it could be risky”, he said.

The dramatic development at a dump in Shenzhen came on Wednesday as police raided the offices of the company in charge of the site and arrested the deputy general manager.

Xinhua said rescuers with heavy machinery were continuing to rake through thousands of tons of soil and rubble to look for survivors.

Official media reported that a quarry at the estate was approved in February a year ago by the local government as a temporary storage site for construction waste.

This is China’s fourth major disaster in a year, beginning with a deadly stampede in Shanghai on New Year’s Eve, followed by a cruise ship capsize on the Yangtze River and massive explosions at a chemicals warehouse in Tianjin that killed more than 170 people.