Truemors
Is poor construction the cause of this collapse?
Sadly it looks like this could be the problem with designers and contractors being held.
Update: 2215 PST
Update 2232 PST
Update 2232 PST
Beijing police have detained 10 people after a subway tunnel collapsed on Wednesday morning trapping six workers.
Rescue work was still underway at the Haidian district of Beijing, but rescue officials held out little hope that the workers could be able to survive the accident.
Those detained include the supervisor and the designers of the tunnel but the labor contractor, Zhou Yongfu, has disappeared, the Beijing Times reports on Friday.
The collapse occurred at 9:20 a.m. Wednesday, but the construction company -- China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co. -- failed to report the accident to municipal authorities and instead tried to rescue the trapped workers on its own.
The management of the project ordered all the workers to stay at the construction site and told them not to talk to media and police. They confiscated mobile phones from workers.
The Beijing municipal authority apparently learned of the accident at 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, almost eight hours after the accident occurred, from an unidentified source.
Workers' anger was palpable. Signs showing the construction company's logo were defaced at the construction site.
Update 2215 PST
The official Xinhua News Agency said at least 50 workers were working underground at the time. A total of 26 workers were rescued and sent to a hospital for treatment, it said. Xinhua said four were dead and 17 missing, and did not account for the three additional workers.
Last year, four construction workers were killed when a subway line being built for this year's Beijing Olympics caved in. Two months later, another accident at a subway construction site in the eastern city of Nanjing killed two workers.
BEIJING (AP) - Rescue workers in eastern China are searching for 17 workers who are missing after a subway tunnel they were building caved in.
The official Xinhua (shin-wah) News Agency reports a 250-foot-wide section of road over the construction site collapsed Saturday, trapping workers and creating a huge crater into which at least 11 vehicles plunged.
Xinhua says rescuers are pumping out water that seeped into the tunnel from a nearby river.
Four bodies had been recovered as of late Sunday. Those missing are believed to be construction workers.
Poor construction quality is a chronic problem in China and is often blamed on bad planning, shoddy work and theft of materials.
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