Dozens Dead or Missing After China Highway Collapse

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Dozens ***** or Missing After China Highway Collapse

At least a dozen people were ******* and many more remained missing on Saturday after part of a highway bridge collapsed Friday night amid heavy rain in western China. It was the second deadly episode in the country in less than three months involving the ******** of a stretch of highway.

State media reported early Saturday afternoon that 12 bodies and seven vehicles had been found, and that one person had been rescued. Eighteen vehicles and 31 people were still missing.

A photograph released by the official

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

on Saturday showed how a bridge in one direction of the highway had snapped. A section of it was folded downward, nearly perpendicular, into a churning, muddy river. A separate bridge that supported traffic in the other direction remained standing.

The head of the Ministry of Emergency Management, Wang Xiangxi, went to the site Saturday morning and was overseeing a rescue effort that involved 869 people, 93 vehicles, 41 drones, 20 boats and a sonar system, according to the authorities.

Both Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, and Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest leader, ordered all-out rescue efforts.

They had issued similar instructions after the previous disaster, which occurred on May 1 also amid heavy rain. At least 48 people ***** after a section of expressway running along the side of a hill in southeastern China gave way, apparently because a landslide began underneath it. Mr. Xi had ordered that local governments across China pay more attention to identifying and dealing with such risks.

In the past week, heavy rain has fallen in the location of the highway collapse, in rugged terrain in the southern part of Shaanxi Province. A flood emergency was declared there this past week. Late spring through late summer is the rainy season in China.

State television also reported on Saturday that a flash flood in neighboring Sichuan Province had left more than 30 people missing in a village about 500 miles southwest of the highway bridge collapse.

China has invested heavily in infrastructure like highways, bridges and rail lines in the past several decades, and much of the construction has been in mountainous terrain. By 2017, China had 81 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges either already built or in progress.

Just in the past two decades, China has also built twice as many miles of expressways as make up the entire interstate highway system in the ******* States.

Cloudbursts have periodically posed a problem. The heaviest hour of rainfall ever reliably recorded in China ******* at least 300 people in the city of Zhengzhou in 2021, including 14 who drowned in a subway tunnel.

The May 1 highway collapse occurred when a landslide pulled the supports out from under an elevated section of expressway along the side of a hill on the outskirts of Meizhou, a city 180 miles northeast of Hong Kong.

Friday’s bridge collapse occurred in a village about 60 miles southeast of Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province. Xi’an is famous for the 2,200-year-old terra-cotta warriors discovered at the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuang.

Xi’an is also a place associated with Mr. Xi. His father was from a rural area about 25 miles north of the emperor’s tomb. Mr. Xi himself left Beijing for his father’s home county soon after Mao’s turbulent Cultural Revolution began in 1966, later spending his teenage years in Shaanxi Province.

Li You contributed research.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Dozens #***** #Missing #China #Highway #Collapse

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

For verified travel tips and real support, visit: https://hopzone.eu/