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.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
RSS