A bridge on the verge of completion in south China has collapsed, killing 28 people and injuring 22 in a possible indication of safety standards ridden rough-shod in the face of breakneck economic development.
Dozens were missing after the 320-metre-long, 42-metre-high bridge spanning the Tuo river in Fenghuang county, Hunan province, collapsed during the evening rush hour on Monday, even as workers were stripping it of scaffolding, the official Xinhua news agency said yesterday.
Footage on state television showed bulldozers and rescue workers picking through a massive pile of debris stretching between two hills at the banks of the river, which flows through a scenic area popular with tourists in western Hunan.
"It is very difficult to recover the missing buried under the rocks," Xinhua quoted the county's Communist Party vice secretary Luo Ming a saying.
Police had detained a construction manager and a "project supervisor" for questioning, Xinhua said, but the cause of the accident was still under investigation.
The collapse came as state media reported that China would fix more than 6,000 damaged or dangerous bridges across the country. A bridge collapse in June in the southern province of Guangdong killed nine people.
Some 400 police had been sent to the scene to keep order and more than 1,500 rescue workers were searching for the missing, Xinhua said. More than 120 doctors and nurses were at the site.
"I saw a lot of bodies lying on the road, some of them were construction workers, and some were passers-by ... blood was everywhere," witness Yang Shunzhong said.
"A car was crushed flat under the bridge, it was so ruined that I could not even tell (its) size." Workplace accidents sites are rife in booming China, where patchy safety enforcement and corner-cutting by contractors result in the deaths of thousands in the country's coal mines, factories and building sites every year.
Mr Yang said the toll could rise much higher. "A lot of women and children were ... crying and looking for their families or friends," he said.
Xinhua quoted Tian Jing, a 29-year-old construction worker on the bridge, as saying three men from his home village were buried in the debris.
At least 123 workers were at the site of the arched concrete bridge, which was to have been completed this month and cost 12 million yuan to build, Xinhua said.
About 60 workers were on the bridge itself when it collapsed, the State Administration of Work Safety said on its Web site.
The collapse had cut off a highway linking Fenghuang county to an airport in neighbouring Guizhou province's Tongren region, a notice posted on the local government Web site said.
An editorial in the official China Daily yesterday warned that thousands of the country's bridges were unsafe. "If left unrepaired these bridges may crumble at any time, wreaking economic havoc and possibly claiming human lives," it said.
The bridge disaster occurred days after the death toll from the Interstate 35W bridge's August 1 collapse into the Mississippi River in Minneapolis was raised to nine.