Earthquake safety checks on all Chinese schools
Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) - Beijing has ordered earthquake safety checks on all schools in the country, one month after hundreds of schools collapsed in the earthquake in Sichuan, killing more than 9,000 students and teachers. The website of the education ministry says that "local governments must carry out a thorough quality check on the public facilities from kindergartens to universities, like school buildings, dorms and public bathrooms", with special attention to those built before 2001. "For these potentially dangerous buildings, we must stop using them and set up a database for future research".
After the earthquake, there has been serious controversy over the many schools that collapsed, while often the buildings around them remained standing (in the photo, the Xinjian elementary school in Dujiangyan, where 300 children died). The parents of many of the students killed have ask for news, investigations, and the punishment of those responsible for the poor construction, but the local governments have responded with silence, with police interventions to break up protests and drive away journalists, with mere words of condolences and modest offers of money (35,000 yuan, or 3,500 euros, for each child killed).
Lin Qiang, vice-president of the provincial education department in Sichuan, in May accused education officials of leaving "loopholes for corruption", and of failing to build the schools properly.
Meanwhile, yesterday the authorities cancelled the alarm over lake Tangjishan, created by the earthquake, the waters of which had been threatening for weeks to burst through the lake wall and flood the surrounding area with its 1.3 million inhabitants. The channel dug in a few days is draining the water away, and the army has used explosives to divert the water through an already destroyed area of the city of Beichuan.
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