News Archive
Probe vowed in quake school collapse
Released on 29/05/2008
The Chinese Government has vowed to investigate the collapse of a school that left more than 1,300 children and teachers dead or missing in the recent earthquake, according to state media.
The decision to launch a specific investigation into the collapse of Beichuan Middle School, in Mianyang city, Sichuan, came a week after the Government promised to punish anyone responsible for substandard construction of schools.
The Beichuan School disaster struck a special cord with the Chinese. Although there was widespread anger at the high number of children killed in the earthquake, the biggest protests came from angry parents of children at the school. They demanded justice over the shoddy school construction that they claim led to their children’s deaths.
Beichuan school opened in 1998 after taking five years to build, then collapsed in a matter of seconds in the earthquake. Two teaching buildings were levelled and another, where 508 students were having class, was badly damaged. More than 1,300 of the school’s 2,900 students and teachers are either dead or missing, according to Xinhua.
“We will preserve all the buildings, whether collapsed or not, for experts to investigate,” Mianyang deputy mayor Zuo Daifu told Xinhua. “The builders will be held responsible if the building work is found to be shoddy.
“Most of the experts will be dispatched soon by the central government,” he said. “But the specific time for the investigation has yet to be decided.”
Beichuan School was the most high-profile collapse, but more than 12,300 schools in Sichuan - nearly 41 per cent of schools in the province - were damaged, according to state media.
China Daily said in an editorial on May 14 that the destruction of school buildings showed that education funds were either “inadequate or are allocated too slowly for local schools to renovate their buildings so that they can withstand major earthquakes”.
Han Jin, head of the planning department of the Education Ministry, said last week that deaths of students and teachers were particularly high and he pledged to investigate the quality of the school buildings.
“If quality problems do exist in school buildings, we will deal with the persons responsible strictly with no tolerance and give the public a satisfactory answer,” he was reported as saying by ABC News, Australia.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development last week ordered local authorities to investigate why school buildings collapsed in the earthquake, said Yang Rong, director of the ministry’s department of standard and norms.
