Collapsed buildings show construction flaws

By Elaine Kurtenbach and William Foreman
Associated Press
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DUJIANGYAN, China - Modern apartment buildings and schools crumbled, smoothly paved highways buckled and bridges collapsed - their flimsy construction no match for the awesome forces of nature.

As the death toll soars from the powerful earthquake that ravaged China’s Sichuan province, the scale of the devastation is raising questions about the quality of China’s recent construction boom.

 

“This building is just a piece of junk,” one newly homeless resident of Dujiangyan yelled Wednesday, her body quivering with rage. Her family salvaged clothing and mementos from their wrecked apartment, built when their older home was razed 10 years ago.

“The government tricked us. It told us this building was well constructed. But look at the homes all around us, they’re still standing,” said the woman, who would give only her surname, Chen.

Three decades of high-paced growth have remade China, with stunning showcase metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai as well as formerly tiny county towns that are now small cities with office towers and multi-storey apartment buildings.

But as the widespread devastation from Monday’s quake shows, the pell-mell pace has led some builders to cut corners, especially in outlying areas largely populated by the very young and the very old.

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Tags: building, China, Chinese, construction, earthquake, news, politics, standards