48 Confirmed Dead In Southern China Highway Collapse, Search Efforts Persist
Beijing — As searchers continued their two-day search through a dangerous and mountainous region on Thursday, the number of fatalities from a collapsed roadway in southeast China rose to 48.
After a month of intense rain in the Guangdong province, one side of the four-lane highway in the city of Meizhou broke way on Wednesday at around two in the morning. Twenty-three cars went down a steep slope, some of which caught fire and sent up flames. The wrecked and burned cars were raised out of the ground using construction cranes.
Three more individuals, according to Meizhou officials, were unidentified pending DNA tests. If they had passed away, it was unclear at first, raising the total number of fatalities to 51. Thirty more persons suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
At a late-afternoon press conference, Meizhou City Mayor Wang Hui stated that the search was still under progress. He stated that no foreigners had been discovered among the deceased.
Rain, sliding gravel and land down the slope, and other factors have complicated the search. The usually lush forest environment was marred by a curved, earth-colored gash caused by the accident. On the slope, excavators cleared out a larger area.
Wen Yongdeng, the Communist Party secretary for the Meizhou emergency management bureau, stated that “the difficulty of the rescue operation has increased because some of the vehicles involved caught fire.”
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“A significant amount of soil covered the majority of the vehicles, burying them in the earth during the collapse,” he stated.
The area’s soil has been saturated by the extended, intense rains, he continued, “making it prone to secondary disasters during the rescue process.”
In the county where the road collapsed, almost 56 centimeters (22 inches) of rain had poured in the last four weeks—more than four times as much as the same period last year. Early in April, several Meizhou villages flooded, and the city has since experienced more rain.
In the last two weeks, there have been record-breaking rain, flooding, and hail in several areas of Guangdong province. Five people were killed by a tornado last weekend during rain and hailstorms in Guangzhou, the provincial capital.
On the first day of the five-day May Day holiday, when many Chinese travel both domestically and overseas, the highway segment fell.
To protect public safety and social stability, Chinese leader Xi Jinping stated that all of China’s regions should strengthen their early warning systems, monitoring, and risk assessments. This was reported by state broadcaster CCTV.