Expert angered by bridge collapse reports
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, August 28, 2012
Bad weather, overloading and human error have been blamed for a series of bridge accidents that left more than 140 people dead over the past five years, but not shoddy construction.
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A ramp on the viaduct that connects the main body of Yangmingtan Bridge in Harbin collapsed early Friday morning, causing four trucks to plunge about 30 meters to the ground. |
The findings have angered an expert who said the bridges were "doomed" to fail due to quality problems.
Fifteen bridges, including three under construction, collapsed between 2007 and this month, killing 141 people and injuring another 111. But official reports made public say that no case was triggered by poor quality.
According to the investigation reports, torrential rainfall and overloaded trucks caused the most accidents, yesterday's Shandong Business Daily reported.
Of the 15 bridges, three - in Henan and Hunan provinces and Chongqing City - were said to have been damaged by heavy rain while overloaded trucks were blamed for problems at four bridges in Chongqing and Hangzhou cities and Fujian and Jilin provinces.
However, when pictures of the wreckage of the Yihe Bridge in Luanchuan County in Henan were published, they showed that no steel bars had been used in the construction of the ramps that had broken. The collapse of the bridge killed 53 people in July 2010.
In July last year, gaps appeared in the middle section of the No. 3 Qianjiang Bridge in Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang Province, injuring a truck driver.
The bridge was said to have been weakened by overloaded trucks, but experts from the city's traffic authority said the bridge had been plagued by severe quality problems. The government announcement, however, insisted the collapse had nothing to do with shoddy construction, the newspaper reported.
Besides torrential rainfall and overloading, authorities also pointed the finger at unlicensed contractors.
Chen Zhaoyuan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said tight schedules and lack of routine maintenance had caused the collapse of the 15 bridges. Only three of them had been in use for more than 15 years.
Some officials had urged contractors to build the bridges as quickly as possible without taking actual conditions into consideration, which resulted in safety hazards, Chen said.
However, the major contributor to the accidents was still poor quality, he said. "Our national standards toward load-bearing capacity are half as strict as international standards. So frequent accidents are doomed to happen due to quality issues," he said.
Last Friday, three people were killed and five injured when a bridge ramp in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, collapsed.
A 120-meter ramp on the multimillion-dollar Yangmingtan Bridge, less than a year after construction finished, tilted and crashed to the ground, sending four trucks plunging 30 meters. Three of the four trucks were heavy-duty vehicles carrying lime. Together they weighed more than 400 tons, the local authority said.
The local government blamed the overloaded vehicles, while China's work safety watchdog said the build quality of the bridge was in question.
"The bridge must have some problems as it collapsed a year after being constructed," Huang Yi, spokesman for the State Administration of Work Safety, told reporters.
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