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China quake shows flaws in building boom
Wednesday May 14, 4:26 pm ET
By Elaine Kurtenbach and William Foreman, Associated Press Writers
China quake shows flaws in country's building boom, with shoddy
practices in small cities
DUJIANGYAN, China (AP) -- Modern apartment buildings and schools
crumbled, smoothly paved highways buckled and bridges collapsed --
their flimsy construction no match for the awesome forces of nature.
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As the death toll soars from the powerful earthquake that ravaged
central 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
multistory 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.
"This new economy in China is not going up safely, it's going up fast,
and the two don't go together," said Roger Bilham, a professor of
geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "You
look at the buildings that fell and they should not have fallen," he
said. "This is a story that has been repeated throughout the
developing nations."
New buildings in Beijing -- like the signature "Bird's Nest" National
Stadium for this August's Olympics -- are built to exacting codes to
withstand earthquakes. But "anti-earthquake standards are not as
strict in places like Sichuan as in Shanghai," said Ren Bing, an
architectural designer at Hong Kong-based China Construction
International Co.
Monday's temblor flattened smaller towns in the disaster zone like
Yingxiu, where 7,700 people were re****ted to have died according to
aerial footage shown on state-run China Central Television. A hilltop
view of Beichuan, another hard-hit town, showed entire blocks of
apartment buildings that seemingly disintegrated.
In Dujiangyan city, where rescuers saved a woman eight months pregnant
who was trapped for 50 hours under a collapsed apartment building,
there was little evidence of steel reinforcement bars in the concrete
rubble.
Other infrastructure old and new suffered as well. Nearly 400 dams,
most of them small, were damaged across Sichuan, the government's
economic planning agency said on its Web site. One of the two bigger
ones, Zipingpu, had cracks four inches across its top; and though the
government said the dam was safe, its reservoir was drained.
China is jolted by thousands of earthquakes every year, at least
several of them major ones that cause significant damage and loss of
life. Since the 1976 quake in Tangshan near Beijing killed at least
240,000 people, the communist government has tried to improve building
standards.
"China has been taking earthquake safety very seriously in the past 10
to 20 years," said Susan Tubbesing, head of the California-based
Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. "From what I understand,
the codes China has adopted in the past 20 years have been good,
solid, seismic codes."
Chinese building codes are designed according to the level of shaking
expected from a major temblor, said Claire Souch, senior director of
model management at the consulting firm Risk Management Solutions,
which is working with the Chinese to *****s the damage.
In Sichuan province, new buildings are built to withstand a shaking
level of 7, Souch said. But the magnitude-7.9 quake produced a shaking
intensity of 10 near the epicenter, which usually results in total
collapses.
"Essentially what happened is the actual ground shaking has far
exceeded the design code for that region," Souch said.
Another problem is that actual enforcement of building codes varies.
The construction boom that has underpinned much of the stunning growth
has also been an invitation for corruption, with officials and
developers colluding. Profit margins are thinner on smaller projects
in less prosperous places, encouraging developers to cut corners.
In larger cities like Shanghai, authorities generally enforce
regulations. But that isn't always true in smaller cities. And in
rural areas, it's out of the question, says Andrew Smeall, an
associate at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations in New
York.
"The cost of trying to go back and make sure everything is built to
code would be prohibitive," he said.
It wasn't just newer buildings that collapsed.
Sichuan, like many parts of China, is dotted with factories left over
from Maoist policies of building up industries far from the coasts for
strategic reasons.
In Hanwang, the town's mostly older buildings were flattened or
severely damaged by the quake. A newer five-story clock tower, its
face stopped at 2:27 -- the time the earthquake struck -- remained
eerily intact.
"They are more than 30 years old," Wu Hao, a factory worker who dashed
out of his apartment with his wife seconds before it collapsed, said
of the destroyed buildings. "That could be why the damage was so
great."
Construction standards can be a sensitive issue in a country where
millions have been forced out of their homes to make way for urban
renewal projects. A professor of engineering at Shanghai's Tongji
University refused to discuss the issue Wednesday, saying it was too
"touchy."
But a commentary in Wednesday's state-run China Daily did question the
staggering death toll, especially in schools wrecked by the quake.
"We cannot afford not to raise uneasy questions about the structural
quality of school buildings," the newspaper said, suggesting an
investigation might find builders to blame.
Part of the earthquake zone sits on a hard marble bedrock, and
builders often do not set foundations deep, viewing such precautions
as difficult and unnecessary, said Ren, the designer.
Ideal building materials include a mixture of steel and concrete that
work together to absorb the stresses of a quake, Bilham said.
But based on photos of the disaster area, many buildings were rigid
concrete-frame structures that lack flexibility and, in an earthquake,
would usually pancake, floor upon floor, Tubbesing said.
That's what happened to Chen's home, which dropped from the third
story to the second.
In Dujiangyan, about 10 percent of buildings collapsed entirely and
almost all suffered some damage. Many of the worst collapses were of
four-to-six-story buildings built of unreinforced brick and hollow
concrete slabs.
At a high school in Juyuan, all but a handful of 900 upper class
students were crushed when their school collapsed in a matter of
seconds, though neighboring buildings appeared little affected.
"These buildings just weren't made for that powerful of a quake. Some
don't even meet the basic specifications," said Dai Jun, a structural
engineer and concrete specialist in Chengdu who was surveying damage
in the area.
At a nationally televised news conference Tuesday, one Chinese
re****ter asked officials why it was that so many schools collapsed
while there were few re****ts of government offices toppling.
The response from Wang Zhenyao, the Civil Affairs Ministry's top
disaster relief official, was to point out that his own agency's
office in Beichuan had collapsed, possibly causing deaths and
injuries.
"Government offices aren't all that sturdy either," he said.
Associated Press writers Chris Bodeen in Dujiangyan, Audra Ang in
Hanwang and Carley Petesch in New York contributed to this re****t.
Kurtenbach re****ted from Shanghai.
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