Authorities were investigating twin tragedies that killed at least 123 people in China last week, checking whether local leaders were negligent following a flash flood in the northeast and creating a panel to trace the cause of a hotel fire in the south, the government said yesterday.
The efforts highlighted China's near-daily dose of natural and manmade disasters with high death tolls.
A shortage of resources, lax enforcement of safety rules and corruption complicate the country's efforts to prevent and cope with such tragedies.
In Heilongjiang Province, at least 92 people -- including 88 students -- were killed when a torrent of water triggered by heavy rains swept down a mountain and slammed into a primary school in the remote town of Shalan on Friday.
Rescue workers were still searching among the ruins for 17 missing students yesterday as truckloads of relief materials arrived, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Some 400 tents have been set up for displaced villagers and medical workers were helping the injured.
Local authorities were under investigation for negligence, Xinhua said. Huang Mingjun, Communist Party secretary of Shalan, and Li Zuoyu, the police chief, allegedly failed to organize timely rescue after the flood, the agency said.
Villagers complained that their appeals for help from the local government and police were ignored, it said.
State-run newspapers ran photos of weeping relatives and the flooded site on their front pages. State television showed vehicles slowly driving through inundated streets and rescue workers in orange jumpsuits working with shovels.
Footage also showed medics carrying bodies out of the wreckage, and children breathing through respirators in a hospital.
Meanwhile, the central government set up a panel to probe the cause of a fire on Friday that engulfed the Huanan Hotel in Shantou, a city in Guangdong Province, killing 31 people.
The investigative team will be led by Sun Huashan, deputy director of the General Administration of Work Safety, Xinhua reported.
Four other people were seriously injured in the fire, which swept through the top three floors of the four-story building. Firefighters were not called to the scene for 35 minutes, the state-run newspaper China Daily reported.
It said the death toll would have been lower if hotel staff had known how to inform guests and the fire brigade of the fire.
"An initial investigation showed that passers-by, not hotel staff, reported the fire and it was fierce before the fire brigade arrived," the newspaper cited Huang Donghua, of the city's information office, as saying.
According to the newspaper, authorities were still trying to track down the hotel's owner, who fled after the fire.
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