China school collapse: city authorities under fire for failing to tell parents what was going on
- Most victims were reported to be members of a middle school girls’ volleyball team who were training at the time of the accident in Qiqihar
- Videos from a hospital appear to show a bereaved father complaining that the girls’ parents were not being kept informed about the rescue operation
State news agency Xinhua said the collapse at the No 34 Middle School in Qiqihar in Heilongjiang province on Sunday killed 11 people and injured four others.
The official Heilongjiang Daily said police had detained personnel from a construction company although neither local police nor official media reports said how many were in custody or what positions they held.
There were 19 people in the building at the time of the collapse, according to Xinhua, which reported four people had escaped.
Officials said rescue efforts were complete. They did not reveal details of the victims but several Chinese media outlets reported that most were school children.
A widely circulated video filmed inside one of the hospitals where the injured were treated showed a man claiming to be the father of a dead pupil who said no one from the local government, the hospital or police had updated parents about the rescue progress for five hours.
Other parents in the video echoed his complaints about the lack of transparency.
The father’s ordeal drew an outpouring of sympathy online, with people reposting the video on social media and asking why the parents were not allowed to know what was happening to their children.
The collapse happened at about 3pm on Sunday. A Xinhua video on Sunday evening showed the roof of the reinforced-concrete gymnasium completely destroyed.
Qiqihar, which is 1,300km (810 miles) northeast of Beijing, has a population of 5.12 million and experienced heavy rain on Sunday, according to the National Meteorological Centre.
Chongqing-based news service Cqnews.net cited several sources who said a girls’ volleyball team was training in the gym when the roof fell.
A witness told an online video outlet affiliated with China Youth Daily there was “nowhere to hide” from the overhead collapse inside the gym.
Some media outlets raised questions about construction standards and about how well-maintained school buildings were.
An opinion piece published by The Beijing News on Monday afternoon asked the local government “where are the construction regulations?”.
Changjiang Daily, Wuhan’s official newspaper, posted on Weibo that the authorities should clarify whether the gym, which was built in 1997, was a “tofu-dreg” project, a widely used idiom for poorly constructed buildings.
China Youth Daily reported that the girls were training over the summer holidays because they were expected to go to Hubei province for upcoming games.
The official WeChat account of Qiqihar No 34 Middle School posted an article on Saturday celebrating the team’s second place in a provincial competition.
According to Heilongjiang Daily, the construction company involved did not build the gymnasium but was overseeing a new school building next door.
It said the company stored building materials made of perlite on the gym’s roof, which had collapsed after it started raining.
Perlite is a highly absorbent mineral used in construction, industry and agriculture.
An engineering expert who teaches at China Agricultural University said on his personal social media page that perlite could weigh 10, or even 25, times its original weight when soaked with rainwater, “greatly increasing roof loads and potentially leading to the collapse”.
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Cqnews.net reported that students had noticed construction materials being stored on the roof over the past year or so.
Heilongjiang Daily said the cause of the accident was still being investigated and that the province’s top two officials, Communist Party secretary Xu Qin and governor Liang Huiling, were on the scene.
On Sunday night, vice-governor of Heilongjiang Wang Yixin held an emergency meeting, referring to the gym collapse and an agricultural plane crash on Saturday that killed two people. He called for “the trend of frequent accidents” to be curbed.
