Rescue workers dug through the tangled wreckage yesterday after a high-speed train smashed into a stalled train in eastern China, killing at least 34 people and seriously injuring 12 in China’s deadliest train disaster since 2008.
The crash happened on Saturday after one train lost power because of a lightning strike and the bullet train behind crashed into it, state media said, raising new questions about the safety of the fast-growing rail network.
Authorities moved quickly to try and assuage public anger, sacking the head of the Shanghai railway bureau, his deputy and the bureau’s Chinese Communist Party chief, the Railways Ministry said in a statement
The three will “also be subject to investigation,” the brief statement added, without elaborating.
The Shanghai bureau is responsible for the province in which the accident happened.
The government revised down by one the death toll, to 34, but said almost 200 remained in hospital, 12 of whom were in critical condition.
Two foreigners also died in the accident, which took place on a bridge near the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, about 1,380km south of Beijing, Xinhua news agency said yesterday. China News Service, a semi-official news agency, said one of them was a woman in her 20s.
Dozens of rescue workers and firefighters used excavators to move the wreckage of the two trains as they believed more bodies were in one of the carriages that was dangling beside the bridge. It was unclear how many people were on the trains at the time of the accident.
In a small piece of good news, state television said rescuers had pulled a four-year-old boy alive from the wreckage.
“The task for us now is to clear the debris and also to check for survivors in those areas that we have not gotten to,” 35-year-old rescue worker Wang Jun said.
The total power failure on Saturday rendered useless an electronic safety system designed to warn following trains of stalled trains on the tracks up ahead, and automatically halt them before a collision can occur.
The force of the collision sent “the head of the train flying into the air,” said Cai Qi, a 30-year-old villager who saw the accident and rescued 10 people.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique