Man rescued three days after China mudslide

A man was rescued early Wednesday morning, more than 60 hours after being buried by a landslide at an industrial park in the southern city of Shenzhen.

Tian was taken to the Guangming New District Central Hospital, where he was in stable condition.

Tian told rescuers another survivor may have been close to where he had been trapped, but officials later said that person was found dead.

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

Firefighters had to squeeze into a narrow room around Tian and pull debris out by hand at the dump site in Hengtaiyu industrial park, rescuer Zhang Yabin told the official Xinhua News Agency.

Wang Yongquan, who narrowly escaped the Shenzhen landslide, said he and his neighbors had watched trucks carrying construction waste for the past two years, and seen a mountain of rubble grow where once was a hollow quarry.

The number of deaths was expected to rise sharply after the so-called “golden period” – the 72-hour window when survival chances are highest – closed.

“After verification, as of 2:30pm on December 22, 76 people in total are still missing, of whom 51 are male and 25 female”.

During the rescue workers found a man’s body nearby that showed no signs of life.

A giant deluge of mud and construction waste from the overfull dump site buried 33 buildings at the industrial park Sunday.

The man-made landslide in Shenzhen is exposing flaws in China’s rapid growth model, which led to the city’s runaway building boom and gave rise to a volatile housing market that has continued to soar despite contractions elsewhere in the country.

Just over three hours later, reports the Guardian, rescue workers in orange and red uniforms managed to hoist him from the scene of the disaster on the outskirts of Shenzhen, a sprawling factory hub in Guangdong province.

The dump was reportedly being used 10 months after it was supposed to have stopped taking waste, earning the managing firm Shenzhen Yixianglong Investment Development 7.5 million yuan (HK$8.97 million) in fees. This was followed by a cruise ship capsize on the Yangtze River in June and huge explosions at a chemicals warehouse in Tianjin that killed over 170 people in August.

On Wednesday morning, the State Council, China’s cabinet, set up an investigation team to look into the landslide. The team will be headed by the minister of land resources.