A nearly 330-foot-long section of a ramp of the eight-lane Yangmingtan Bridge in the city of Harbin dropped 100 feet to the ground. Four trucks plummeted with it, resulting in three deaths and five injuries.
The 9.6-mile bridge is one of three built over the Songhua River in that area in the past four years. China’s massive economic stimulus program in 2009 and 2010 helped the country avoid most of the effects of the global economic downturn, but involved incurring heavy debt to pay for the rapid construction of new bridges, highways and high-speed rail lines all over the country.
The quality of that rapid construction, including not just the materials used but even whether the projects were properly engineered, has been the subject of national debate ever since a high-speed train plowed into the back of a stopped train on the same track on July 23 last year in the eastern city of Wenzhou. The crash killed 40 people and injured 191; a subsequent investigation particularly blamed flaws in the design of the signaling equipment.
Photos on Chinese Web sites on Friday appeared to show that the collapsed section of the Yangmingtan Bridge’s ramp had fallen on land, not in the river itself.
According to the official Xinhua news agency, the Yangmingtan Bridge was the sixth major bridge in China to collapse since July 2011. Chinese officials have tended to blame the collapses on overloaded trucks, and did so again on Friday.
Bridges in the United States are built with very large safety margins in case heavy loads cross them, however. Many in China have attributed the recent spate of bridge collapses to corruption, and Internet reaction to the latest collapse was scathing.
“Corrupt officials who do not die just continue to cause disaster after disaster,” said one post on Friday on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service similar to Twitter.
Another Internet user expressed “hope that the government will put heavy emphasis on this and investigate to find out the real truth, and give both the dead and the living some justice!” A third user was more laconic, remarking, “Tofu engineering work leads to a tofu bridge.”
Chinese news media reported that the bridge had cost 1.88 billion renminbi, or almost $300 million.
Hilda Wang contributed reporting.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/asia/collapse-of-new-bridge-underscores-chinas-infrastructure-concerns.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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