One Man Pulled Alive from Landslide in China’s Shenzhen

The man already extracted was 19-year-old Tian Zeming from the southern city of Chongqing, rescued early Wednesday morning.

Rescuers surround the area where they found a survivor under a collapsed building at the site of a landslide that hit an industrial park on Sunday, in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China on December 23, 2015.

Xinhua reported that rescuers had located Tian underground at 3:30 a.m. and pulled him out of a collapsed factory building three hours later.

Also Tuesday, rescuers recovered a man’s body in the first confirmed death from Sunday’s mudslide at the construction dump site in Shenzhen. Geysers of debris exploded into the air as the mud swept through the city.

Zhu Tingfeng, deputy secretary of the municipal government, said at a press conference Thursday that they have been in touch with the families of 59 missing people.

According to the official Xinhua news service, Xing Feng, a civil engineering professor from Shenzhen University, had previously cautioned that China’s quantity of construction debris has grown rapidly in the past two decades, averaging at one ton per person, with the country’s disposal management mechanism lagging far behind.

Emergency workers jammed through a hole into a small room, pulling rubble out by hand over two hours to get to Tian.

The landslide covered 380,000 square meters with residue soil of 10 meters deep, damaging a section of the second West-to-East natural gas pipeline, partially cutting off the natural gas supply to Hong Kong.

“As of noon on Wednesday, more than 1,800 local people were in temporary shelters, and some of them have been moved into 15 hotels in the hope of improving their living conditions”, Zhang said.

Tian had told rescuers that he was near another survivor, yet state media said that by the time rescuers found the person, he had already died.

Heavy rains saturated the soil, making it heavy and unstable, and ultimately causing it to collapse with massive force in and around an industrial park.

“The rescue work won’t slow”, Yue Xi, a police officer at the scene, told Xinhua news agency.

It was the second man-made disaster in China in four months.

Documents on the website 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 July.

In August, a series of blasts at a chemical warehouse in Tianjin, a municipality near Beijing, killed more than 100 people and injured almost 800.