The death of six pupils in Pu County, Shanxi Province has again sounded the alarm for safety education in China. In fact, the lack of safety education is to be attributed to accidents on campus.

 

All the six pupils lived on campus. On December 4, the six of them went to sleep in their dormitory at 7:30 PM. An hour later when the cook sensed something untoward had happened to them, it was too late.

 

The police found that the stoker had put an electricity generator in the storehouse next to the dormitory, and the carbon monooxide released by it killed the six pupils.

 

Sadly, the six pupils are not the only victims of accidents on campus in China. An accident happed on last November 18 in a high school in Jiangxi Province, when six students were trampled to death in a sudden stampede.

 

A rainstorm on June 10, 2005 in Shalan Town, Heilongjiang Province, and the mud-rock flow caused by it took the lives of 105 pupils there.

 

It is time to put the matter of safety education on the agenda, before too many children die tragic deaths.

 

(Chinanews.cn December 15, 2006)