Not your typical suffocation case
- By Liu Yan
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E-mail CRI, April 13, 2016
It has been two weeks since a pregnant woman died after getting her neck caught in a roadside guardrail in Mizhi County, Shaanxi Province. To be honest, pictures and videos of the freaky incident still give me the creeps.
The police have confirmed that it was just a rare accident and no foul play was involved. As surveillance footage and an on-site investigation suggested, the woman accidentally got her neck trapped while fainting beside the rail. That's right. She happened to faint at the wrong place, and she died as a result.
What's extra sad about this story is that the woman was pregnant with twins. In other words, the accident didn't just cost one life. It cost three lives!!!
And this is not the first deadly case involving China's roadside guardrails in recent years. Back in 2010, an elderly woman in Nantong suffocated to death after getting her head stuck in a railing. In 2013, a young woman died after trapping her neck in a guardrail in downtown Beijing. Last year, an elderly man died in a similar situation, also in Beijing.
While China's housing construction authority has issued regulations that limit the spacing between railings in balconies in residential buildings to a maximum of 11 centimeters, there are no clear specifications regarding road railings.
A manager from a Chinese manufacturing company that specializes in road railings says their products have an open space of 15 or 17 centimeters.
So I guess the solution is pretty obvious. Take a page from the housing construction authority's book and make 11 centimeters the universal standard for the spacing between railings! Such tragedies won't keep happening then.
But here's the tricky part. That manager also says the municipal administrative departments are their biggest customers, and they won't even accept any new patterns (meaning rails with an open space that is not 15 or 17 centimeters).
Shame on those administrative departments. Bureaucracy much? Their refusal to be flexible and disregard for safety have literally killed innocent people!
That said, there are some other points I want to make regarding this particular case with the pregnant lady.
First of all, I have seen countless netizens jump to conclusions. They keep complaining about this "cold society", where no one is willing to step up to the plate and offer help. They blame all those previous cases where the people who get help turn around and blackmail their helpers. "You did this to me! Give me monetary compensation, or I'll sue you!" Blah blah blah.
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