4 others injured at high school in capital when bars fall on workers

Ten workers were killed and another four were injured when they were buried under steel bars that collapsed at a construction site in Beijing on Monday.

The accident happened at 8:20 am as the 14 were working on the construction of a gymnasium at the High School Attached to Tsinghua University, the Beijing municipal government said in a statement.

The workers were attaching steel reinforcing bars - known as rebars - inside the foundation pit when the structure collapsed, according to workers at the site.

No students or faculty were injured, and the accident did not affect classes at the school, one of the most prestigious in the capital. The four injured workers were said to be out of danger on Monday afternoon.

The police have detained several people, officials said. The gymnasium is being built by the First Construction & Engineering Co Ltd, a division of the Beijing Construction Engineering Group, one of the country's leading contractors.

Kong Weiping, a 59-year-old construction worker, said 60 to 70 workers were at the site when the accident happened.

Rebar is used to provide reinforcement for concrete buildings. The bars at the school were arranged in two layers, and the workers who were buried were in a 1.5-meter-high gap between the layers. The next stage of the construction process would have involved pouring concrete over the bars.

"There was a roaring noise, and I saw the whole structure collapse in a second," said Kong, who was working at the top of the bars. "Workers immediately rushed to try to save those who were buried.

"We tried all we could to lift the layers of steel off them, but we were only able to get four or five of them out. The bars were too densely packed in some areas, and it was beyond human strength to remove them."

Kong said 30 minutes passed before rescuers arrived, and they took more than an hour to get all the workers out.

Some safety officials and workers have questioned the design of the project, saying that the fact that there were no girders to provide support made a collapse more likely.

"I have never worked in this design of ground pit," Kong said.

Some relatives of the dead and injured had not received official notification of the accident on Monday afternoon.

Li Yongjun, a worker at the site and the father of one of those who was buried, said he had no idea whether his son was dead or alive.

"I was trying to get on the ambulance, but I was pulled out," he said. "Now I don't know where he is and which hospital he was in."

Contact the writers at xuwei@chinadaily.com.cn and luowangshu@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 12/30/2014 page4)