A new railway line being built for the August Beijing Olympic Games was a factor in a train crash that left 71 people dead in east China, officials and state media said yesterday.
The pre-dawn Monday crash near Zibo was the most severe in China in over 10 years, also leaving over 400 people injured.
Authorities blamed the accident in Shandong Province on the excessive speed of a train from Beijing to Qingdao — site of the Olympic sailing competition — that derailed and slammed into an oncoming train.
Zhang Mingqi (張鳴起), vice-head of a Cabinet-level investigative team into the accident, said that orders had gone out to drivers to reduce speed on the section of the track where the accident occurred because of construction on the line.
At the site of the crash workers had dug a more than 20m-deep hole that is to serve as the foundations as they link up another railway line from the Shandong capital of Jinan, local officials said.
“This is part of the Jinan-Qingdao line which is being built for the Olympic Games,” Zibo city spokesman Li Chenggang said as he pointed out the construction project at the site of the crash.
“The line is expected to be completed before the Olympic Games and will make travel between Jinan and Qingdao much faster,” Li said.
On April 23, the Jinan Railway Bureau in Shandong printed an order to reduce train speeds on the section of the line under construction to 80kph, Zhang said.
The train was traveling 13kph when it derailed as it rounded a curve near the construction site.
Orders to reduce speed were not properly transmitted to train drivers, the Beijing News said.
But “after this order was issued, no one confirmed that it had been received by the concerned work units [drivers],” the paper said.
Workers on the project, many of whom had assisted in pulling out injured and dead passengers from the Monday wreck, refused to comment on whether their construction work contributed to the wreck.
But Wang Jun (王君), head of the State Administration of Work Safety, said that authorities were also investigating whether the construction work had destabilized the existing track.
“In this investigation we need to clearly grasp factors in several areas, the first is the foundation of the track, whether or not it is stable,” Xinhua news agency quoted Wang as saying.
Three top officials of the Jinan Railway Bureau have already been sacked in the aftermath of the accident.
The Chinese authorities have scrambled to deal with the fall-out from the wreck, with 19 hospitals in Zibo working overtime to deal with the injured.
“Since the accident, the work carried out by Zibo city has gone smoothly,” Liu Xinsheng, vice-secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in Zibo, told reporters on Tuesday.
“Now we face the very hard and difficult task of taking care of all those who have been injured,” Liu said.
The accident was the second rail tragedy in Shandong this year. In January, a high-speed train ploughed into a group of railway workers in the province, killing 18.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to