School safety questioned after China quake
By John Ruwitch
HANWANG, China, May 15 (Reuters) - Parents crowded rescue workers and troops near schools devastated by Monday's earthquake, desperate for news of their children as many began questioning why school buildings were among the first to topple.
The scenes are among the most poignant from the tragedy of the 7.9 magnitude quake that levelled whole towns, left nearly 15,000 dead and trapped thousands more in rubble.
But coming in the middle of the afternoon, when most children were at their desks, the collapse of schools throughout the area means that students appear to form a disproportionate number of the dead and buried.
It has also raised questions about building safety in a nation reeling from the tragedy and desperate for answers.
"Why did the school buildings always collapse first? Who should be responsible for these poor kids?" a blogger surnamed Sun wrote on the popular Web portal qq.com.
Hanwang, about 60 km (37 miles) east of the epicentre in the southwestern province of Sichuan, was one of the towns where a school collapsed, the upper floors of the four-storey blue-and-white tiled building sandwiching the lower floors.
At a nearby sports ground where bodies of the hundreds of students and teachers were being laid out, a woman stood by the body of her 17-year-old daughter, who was wrapped in a blanket, her sneakers poking out.
"They just pulled her out of the rubble in the middle of the night last night," she said.
Her daughter's fourth-floor classroom came crashing down when the quake struck at 2.28 in the afternoon, leaving her among the 300 students and teachers at the school trapped in the rubble.
"The whole class was gone," she said.
The woman, who declined to give her name, was not apportioning blame.
"The power of the earthquake was just too great and the building a little too old," she said.
ONE CHILD POLICY
The loss of so many children is particularly poignant in China, where the government's family planning policies, aimed at curbing population growth, mean that most have only one child.
The one-child policy has also led to a generation of parents who dote on their single son or daughter, investing their savings in the child's education as well as counting on him or her to look after them in old age.
At the side of the rubble that was Dongqi High School, Zhang Yonglu stoically waited for word of his son, Zhang Shikai, who was also on the fourth floor when the quake brought the building down, while his wife awaits at the main gate.
It was their third day at the site.
"The building is over 40 years old, it was built in 1967. It had no frame and it would have cracked in a weak earthquake," Zhang said. "It was too old. How could they keep using such an old building?"
Other parents gathered and started flinging abuse at the company that owned the building, saying school authorities had told them that some 30 million yuan had been alloted last year to move the students into a new building.
That never happened.
"They were just playing with lives," Zhang said.
Away from the heart of the disaster, bloggers and even normally staid state media were also asking questions.
"Tragic though the circumstances are, we cannot afford not to raise uneasy questions about the structural quality of school buildings," the China Daily said in an editorial.
"If subsequent investigations indicate that most of the school buildings collapsed because of their poor quality construction or the builders' shoddy compliance with building rules, we must make a firm resolve to do away with such man-made factors ...," it said.
Construction quality aside, there is little consciousness of basic safety in China, where buildings from student dormitories to factory blocks regularly chain shut their emergency exits, apparently to guard against intruders or robbery.
"Do we have any safety textbooks for our children? Do the officials in the education ministry have any sense of safety?" asked another blogger, called Houqingdao, at www.anquan.com.cn.
(Writing and additional reporting by Lindsay Beck; Editing by Ken Wills)
HANWANG, China, May 15 (Reuters) - Parents crowded rescue workers and troops near schools devastated by Monday's earthquake, desperate for news of their children as many began questioning why school buildings were among the first to topple.
The scenes are among the most poignant from the tragedy of the 7.9 magnitude quake that levelled whole towns, left nearly 15,000 dead and trapped thousands more in rubble.
But coming in the middle of the afternoon, when most children were at their desks, the collapse of schools throughout the area means that students appear to form a disproportionate number of the dead and buried.
It has also raised questions about building safety in a nation reeling from the tragedy and desperate for answers.
"Why did the school buildings always collapse first? Who should be responsible for these poor kids?" a blogger surnamed Sun wrote on the popular Web portal qq.com.
Hanwang, about 60 km (37 miles) east of the epicentre in the southwestern province of Sichuan, was one of the towns where a school collapsed, the upper floors of the four-storey blue-and-white tiled building sandwiching the lower floors.
At a nearby sports ground where bodies of the hundreds of students and teachers were being laid out, a woman stood by the body of her 17-year-old daughter, who was wrapped in a blanket, her sneakers poking out.
"They just pulled her out of the rubble in the middle of the night last night," she said.
Her daughter's fourth-floor classroom came crashing down when the quake struck at 2.28 in the afternoon, leaving her among the 300 students and teachers at the school trapped in the rubble.
"The whole class was gone," she said.
The woman, who declined to give her name, was not apportioning blame.
"The power of the earthquake was just too great and the building a little too old," she said.
ONE CHILD POLICY
The loss of so many children is particularly poignant in China, where the government's family planning policies, aimed at curbing population growth, mean that most have only one child.
The one-child policy has also led to a generation of parents who dote on their single son or daughter, investing their savings in the child's education as well as counting on him or her to look after them in old age.
At the side of the rubble that was Dongqi High School, Zhang Yonglu stoically waited for word of his son, Zhang Shikai, who was also on the fourth floor when the quake brought the building down, while his wife awaits at the main gate.
It was their third day at the site.
"The building is over 40 years old, it was built in 1967. It had no frame and it would have cracked in a weak earthquake," Zhang said. "It was too old. How could they keep using such an old building?"
Other parents gathered and started flinging abuse at the company that owned the building, saying school authorities had told them that some 30 million yuan had been alloted last year to move the students into a new building.
That never happened.
"They were just playing with lives," Zhang said.
Away from the heart of the disaster, bloggers and even normally staid state media were also asking questions.
"Tragic though the circumstances are, we cannot afford not to raise uneasy questions about the structural quality of school buildings," the China Daily said in an editorial.
"If subsequent investigations indicate that most of the school buildings collapsed because of their poor quality construction or the builders' shoddy compliance with building rules, we must make a firm resolve to do away with such man-made factors ...," it said.
Construction quality aside, there is little consciousness of basic safety in China, where buildings from student dormitories to factory blocks regularly chain shut their emergency exits, apparently to guard against intruders or robbery.
"Do we have any safety textbooks for our children? Do the officials in the education ministry have any sense of safety?" asked another blogger, called Houqingdao, at www.anquan.com.cn.
(Writing and additional reporting by Lindsay Beck; Editing by Ken Wills)
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