At 9:20 am on Wednesday 28th March, 2007, a subway tunnel under construction near to Haidian University, northwest of Beijing collapsed trapping six workers. The accident occurred during construction of Line 10 linking Haidian with central Beijing. Line 10 will connect to a separate line running directly to the Olympic Village north of Beijing when it is finished in 2008 (read
E-News Weekly 8/2007, 48/2006 & 37/2006).
Not surprisingly, the first response of the bosses from the state-run construction company China Railway 12th Bureau Group was to cover up the accident. Rather than notifying authorities and call city emergency services, the on-site managers organized their own rescue team, asked the rescuers and workers to hand over their cell phones, ordered everyone to keep quiet, locked the gate, sealed off the site to prevent anyone from leaving, and then...wait for it. When the police noticed a crowd gathering, they were told that nothing was wrong.
Unfortunately for the bosses, city police learned of the accident several hours after it happened when a migrant construction worker who managed to keep his cell phone secretly called a relative in his home province of Henan, who told the local police. Henan authorities called the Beijing police and by the evening, emergency workers were on the scene and the story had broken in the local media and numerous Chinese blogs. Tragically, it was too late for the six men trapped underground.
The construction company waited at least eight hours before notifying authorities of the accident. The first body was found after 50 hours of digging following the collapse. State media said on 2nd April that five bodies had been recovered from the construction site and that the body of the sixth worker trapped under tonnes of debris was still being sought.
The collapse occurred the day after Beijing held city-wide celebrations marking the 500-day countdown to the Olympics. Construction on the tunnel, according to experts, has led to even the most basic security measures being ignored. The 25 km Line 11 has reported several floods and cave-ins in the past.
Ten people have been arrested over the accident including the supervisor and designers of the subway tunnel. But the firm�s labour contractor, Zhou Yongfu, disappeared, seemingly trying to avoid arrest.
Above all, the cover-up has sparked some disturbing questions about the culture of secrecy and has renewed questions about transparency in Beijing's preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympics while pressure surrounds China�s effort to prepare for the event. The tunnel collapsed during an intense campaign to build four new subway lines and a light rail line to the city airport that are slated to be finishedin time for the Olympics. At least three other stretches of subway have caved in or collapsed in the past 18 months as Beijing scrambles to finish its Olympic transit projects. Two people were killed in one cave-in at another subway location in June 2006. In January last year, a section of highway running past Beijing's central business district caved in, rupturing a sewage pipe and flooding a subway construction site (read
E-News Weekly 2/2006).
President Hu Jintao promised that China would stage a top quality Olympics, but problems have begun to emerge as the city races to get ready. Cost overruns are affecting construction firms, some of which had failed to pay workers' wages.
What is surprising is the openness with which the state media has been reporting the incident. The People's Daily English language edition carried the story on the Thursday morning and even included a photo of the accident scene on its website. The China Daily ran a story on its website about the botched cover-up attempt by the site managers. The cover-up was also reported in editions of several Beijing Chinese-language newspapers. This is all particularly interesting given the recent announcement of a new government policy to crack down on "dishonest reporting" of accidents and deal harshly with mine owners who try to cover up or hide accidents at their sites. In 2006, according to the State Work Safety Supervision Administration, 4,746 Chinese coal miners were killed in thousands of blasts, floods, and other accidents.
In a circular to other contractors working on the expansion of Beijing's subway system ahead of the Games, Beijing's Municipal Construction Committee said that the cover-up had angered the public.
However, five days after the incident, the Beijing city government had yet to provide information to the public about how the collapse had occurred. State television blamed the tunnel collapse on "porous soil" but gave no other details. The Beijing Olympic Organising Committee declined to comment on the tunnel collapse, saying construction of the subway line was an infrastructure project run by the city government and not directly related to the Games.
