Bridge under construction in China collapses

BEIJING (AP) - China Central Television reports a bridge under construction as a tourist attraction in central China has collapsed, killing at least 22 people and leaving 46 missing.

China's Xinhua News Agency says 64 people were rescued, including 22 who were injured when the 320-metre bridge spanning the Jiantuo River in Hunan province collapsed.

The cause of the collapse is under investigation.

The bridge in Hunan's Fenghuang county had four decorative stone arches and was scheduled to open at the end of this month.

It collapsed as workers were removing scaffolding from its facade.

TV showed bulldozers plowing through the rubble, overturning chunks of stone and concrete mixed in a tangle of steel reinforcement bars.

Xinhua said Hunan Gov. Zhou Qiang was at the scene overseeing rescue efforts.

Most of the people working on the bridge were local farmers, the agency said.

Construction accidents in China are frequent, with contractors often opting for shoddy materials to cut costs and using migrant labourers with little or no safety training.

In its annual report on road safety last year, the Ministry of Communications categorized 6,300 of the country's bridges as dangerous because of serious damage to their "structural components," China Daily newspaper reported Tuesday.

The newspaper quoted Xiao Rucheng, secretary general of China's Institute of Bridge and Structural Engineering, saying many of the country's new bridges are being built too quickly and were poorly designed.

Xiao also said China should "learn a lesson from the Mississippi bridge and accelerate the inspection of unsafe bridges," referring to the Aug. 1 collapse of a major insterstate bridge in Minneapolis that killed nine people and left four others still missing.

Authorities are trying to determine exactly what caused the nearly four-decade-old Minnesota bridge to crumble.

Surrounded by lush mountains and rice paddies, the ancient city Fenghuang is a well-known tourist spot and home to the Miao ethnic minority. It is also famed for traditional stilt houses lining the Tuojiang River.

The Fenghuang bridge collapse was among China's worst in recent memory. On June 15, a bridge in South China's Guangdong province collapsed when a cargo vessel loaded with sand rammed into it, killing nine people. That bridge was built in 1988 and spanned the Xijiang River, a major tributary of the Pearl River.

In January 1999 a pedestrian bridge spanning the Qi River in southwestern China's Sichuan province collapsed three years after it was built. Forty people died and another 14 were injured.

Following the accident, a local county deputy Communist party secretary was sentenced to death for accepting a bribe from a childhood friend in exchange for the bridge-building contract.

China Daily ran an editorial Tuesday saying rising traffic levels make the need for national bridge repairs and upgrades an urgent issue.

"If left unrepaired these bridges may crumble at any time, (wreaking) economic havoc and possibly claiming human lives," it said, without mentioning the Fenghuang disaster, which wasn't reported until late Monday.