(Beijing) Fifty-three dead and only ten survivors. This is the final assessment of the collapse of a building in China after a week of research to try to rescue victims.
Updated yesterday at 11:31 p.m.
The eight-storey building, which housed a hotel, apartments and a cinema, collapsed on April 29 in the city of Changsha (center), capital of Hunan province, for an as yet undetermined reason.
“All the people trapped and of whom we had no news on the site (of the disaster) have been found”, indicated Friday the public television CCTV in a final report. The rescue operations are now “over”, the channel said.
At a press conference on Friday, city officials offered their condolences to the families of the victims and their “sincere apologies”.
Shortly after the tragedy, President Xi Jinping ordered a thorough investigation into the cause of the disaster and called for the victims to be searched for “at any price”.
Hundreds of rescuers were thus mobilized and television broadcast images of the operations live on social networks.
In recent days, rescuers, equipped with heavy equipment, have been trying to make their way through the debris.
For the past week, rescue operations have been continuing to try to find hypothetical survivors as well as the bodies of deceased persons.
Thursday, more than 131 hours after the disaster, five and a half days, a woman was thus able to be extracted alive from the rubble. A rescue described as “miraculous” by Internet users.
At all costs
This tenth survivor was “conscious and even reminded the rescuers to avoid any movement likely to injure her”, reported the official news agency China news.
Earlier, a 21-year-old girl had also been found alive. She was preparing for an exam in her room when it collapsed.
According to the People’s Daily, an official newspaper, the miraculous was able to survive for 88 hours before being rescued, because she had a blanket at hand, but above all a container still half-filled with water, which she drank. in small sips to stay alive.
Eleven people, including the building owner and a team of security inspectors, have been arrested in connection with the building collapse, according to Changsha authorities.
Two of them are suspected of having made transformations that “altered” the building. The inspectors would have falsified a security expertise.
This type of disaster occurs regularly in China. Most of the investigations that are then carried out highlight non-compliance with construction standards.
The collapse of a hotel in July 2021 in Suzhou (east), a large city near Shanghai, left 17 dead.
In March 2020, another hotel, requisitioned as a place of quarantine against the COVID-19 epidemic, collapsed in the coastal city of Quanzhou (east), killing 29 people.