Hopes of finding more survivors from the rubble of a collapsed commercial building in central China faded yesterday, at the end of a 72-hour “golden” rescue period identified by authorities.
The building in Changsha City, Hunan Province — which housed apartments, a hotel and a cinema — caved in on Friday, sparking a massive rescue effort with hundreds of emergency responders.
There has been no official confirmation of any rescues since a seventh survivor was pulled from the rubble on Sunday afternoon, leaving at least 16 people authorities have identified as trapped.
Photo: AP
No contact has been established with 39 others.
Changsha Mayor Zheng Jianxin (鄭建新) had said the government would “seize the golden 72 hours for rescue,” a window that closed yesterday afternoon.
The seventh person was rescued more than 50 hours into the search effort, state broadcaster China Central Television said.
A 1m-thick wall had separated the survivor from rescuers, who located her after detecting signs of life at the spot on Sunday.
Changsha police said that besides the owner, they had arrested three people in charge of design and construction and five others for what they said was a false safety assessment for a guest house on the building’s fourth to sixth floors.
In photographs the building appeared to have pancaked down to about the second floor, leaving rubble strewn on the sidewalk. It had stood in a row of buildings about six stories tall.
Xinhua news agency said the building had eight floors, including a restaurant on the second floor, a cafe on the third floor and residences on the top two floors.
Other media reports said it was a six-story building.
Tenants had made structural modifications to the building, but the cause of the collapse remained under investigation, Xinhua reported.
Police said the Hunan Xiangda Engineering Testing Co issued the false safety report on April 13. The arrested included the legal representative of the company and four technicians suspected of providing the assessment.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Saturday called for a search “at all cost” and ordered a thorough investigation into the cause of the collapse, state media reported.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS