China downplays role of construction in disaster

Published on March 9, 2009 by brooks | This story has been viewed 180 times

AP, BEIJING
Monday, Mar 09, 2009, Page 1

The strength of last year’s massive earthquake in southwestern China was the main reason so many schools collapsed, an official said yesterday, adding the number of schoolchildren who died was still being calculated.

The remarks by Wei Hong (魏宏), executive vice governor of Sichuan Province, came after a probe and appeared to dismiss parents’ claims that shoddy construction was to blame for some 7,000 classrooms collapsing — when other nearby buildings stood.

The 7.9-magnitude temblor in May left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing, but the government has never said how many of the casualties were students.

“The scale of the earthquake was very great and the intensity was very strong, so that was the most important cause of the damage to the school buildings and other facilities,” Wei said at a news conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.

Wei said the conclusion was made after an investigation by engineering experts from Tsinghua University and experts from Sichuan Province.

Wei said the quake’s destructive force was “one or two degrees” stronger than the schoolhouses had been designed to withstand.

It was unclear if the investigation Wei was speaking of was the government’s promised probe into possible graft in the construction of schools. In September, a Chinese government scientist acknowledged that a rush to build schools in recent years likely led to construction flaws that caused so many of them to collapse — the first official admission that low building standards may have been behind many of the students’ deaths.

Thousands of children are believed to have died in their classrooms during the quake. Wei said the exact number was still being calculated and that the process was “very complicated” because of various rules that must be followed.

“We need to conduct a series of calculations and checks, especially of the locations and basic information of those missing,” Wei said. “Before the exact final death toll has been confirmed, it is very hard to determine the correct number of schoolchildren who died.”

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