At least 34 people were killed after an industrial rock and mud slide swept through a town in northern China, engulfing homes, a market and an office building, the government said yesterday.
The death toll from Monday’s disaster in a small mining town in Shanxi Province could rise, with state television reporting that hundreds of people could still be missing and footage showing entire streets buried under the sludge.
“Most importantly we must focus on the search work,” Shanxi Governor Meng Xuenong (孟學農) said on state television. “We must make a 100 percent effort to save the lives of people.”
The incident occurred about 8am on Monday when rain-triggered mud slides breached the walls of a reservoir holding waste ore dregs at an illegal mine and stormed into Taoshi Township, China’s work safety administration said.
A three-story office building, a market place and numerous homes in Taoshi, which sits below the ore tailings reservoir, were destroyed by the flow of mud and mining waste, the administration said in a statement on its Web site.
Stall operators at the the market place and office workers were just arriving to their jobs when the mud slide came crashing down.
“It was terrible,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted local worker Wei Guanghui as saying. “The mud-rock flow looked about seven meters high. It roared down the valley and washed away the market and the houses in a few minutes.”
More than 1,000 police, soldiers and firemen were digging through the rubble and mud yesterday in the hope of finding survivors, the administration said.
Photos of the rescue showed workers wading through the mud probing for victims with long poles.
The work safety administration said the confirmed death toll was 34, with 35 injured and an unknown number of people missing.
The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, citing locals at the scene, said up to 500 people could have been buried, but local authorities could not confirm any numbers.
“We really don’t know how many people were there at that time. We are busy with search and rescue work at present,” an official at Xiangfen county, which oversees Taoshi, said by phone.
Work safety officials are blaming the Tashan ore mine for the disaster and have detained the mine boss and eight other company officials, the administration said on its Web site.
The Tashan mining company was operating illegally and the stored waste ore dregs had surpassed the capacity of the reservoir, Wang Dexue (王德學), vice head of the work safety administration, said on state television.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
DEMONSTRATIONS: A protester said although she would normally sit back and wait for the next election, she cannot do it this time, adding that ‘we’ve lost too much already’ Thousands of protesters rallied on Saturday in New York, Washington and other cities across the US for a second major round of demonstrations against US President Donald Trump and his hard-line policies. In New York, people gathered outside the city’s main library carrying signs targeting the US president with slogans such as: “No Kings in America” and “Resist Tyranny.” Many took aim at Trump’s deportations of undocumented migrants, chanting: “No ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” In Washington, protesters voiced concern that Trump was threatening long-respected constitutional norms, including the right to due process. The
RSS