By AUSTIN RAMZY DEC. 21, 2015



HONG KONG — As rescuers searched Monday for survivors of a catastrophic landslide in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, a series of failures and ignored warnings that contributed to the disaster began to emerge.

The Ministry of Land and Resources said the landslide that destroyed at least 33 buildings on Sunday was caused by the collapse not of a hillside but of a sodden mountain of dirt and construction debris in an industrial area. At least 91 people were missing as of early Monday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The rain-soaked material had built up for nearly two years at the site of a former quarry, Xinhua said, citing residents there.

China’s rapid construction of new buildings, and the short life of many of those structures, have long created problems with unregulated dumping of construction waste. Often the result is illegal, multistory piles of debris that appear on the outskirts of cities, creating problems with dust and flooding because of blocked waterways.

The landslide on Sunday appears to have been one of the most destructive episodes yet connected with the practice. The destroyed buildings included at least three worker dormitories, and an unknown number of people may still be buried.


Firefighters resting near collapsed buildings at the site of a landslide in the Chinese city of Shenzhen on Monday. Credit China Network/Reuters
A gas pipeline also exploded during the landslide, Xinhua said. That section of the West-East pipeline, which brings natural gas from the Xinjiang region in western China, was then sealed, it added.

Seven people had been rescued and more than 900 evacuated, the state-run China Central Television reported. An additional 13 people were hospitalized, it said.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, called on Sunday for all-out efforts to find survivors.

Domestic news media was filled with frightening images of the destruction. Aerial photographs showed a sea of reddish-brown muck rising several stories along a series of buildings, some partly collapsed. Earth movers clawed at positions where buildings had been engulfed by the debris.

Cellphone video posted on the website of Caixin, a business news outlet, showed a cloud of material fill the air shortly before an industrial building of about six stories collapsed in a matter of seconds. “It all toppled,” a bystander is heard saying. “It’s all gone.”



Mo Shaoqing, who dismantles old cars and sells their parts for a living, has lived near the industrial park with her husband in a small apartment building. The district has single-story houses, some factories assembling electronics, and low-rise apartment buildings. She saw bulldozers come every day to dump dirt in the former quarry, stopping only when it rained.

Ms. Mo was chatting with neighbors Sunday morning when they heard a large boom. “The noise halted for a while and then started again, and it got a louder and louder,” she said. “We were joking that it must be some rich people lighting lots of firecrackers.”

Then they saw people running and warning others to flee. Only then did she realize a landslide was coming their way. “We were still in pajamas and slippers,” she said. “We had no time to get our stuff at home and immediately ran.”

Some people who thought the slide had stopped climbed to the top of a low-rise building, Ms. Mo said. “The slide then hit those apartments, and I saw people on the roof fall off the building,” she said.

In Ms. Mo’s apartment later, many of the appliances wer buried in dirt. She grabbed a few clothes before heading to temporary housing for displaced people.


A woman praying near collapsed buildings in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The destroyed buildings included at least three worker dormitories, and an unknown number of people may still be buried. Credit Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images
Shenzhen was one of China’s first special economic zones, where free market economic measures were introduced in the 1980s. It has increasingly moved into advanced industries like biotechnology, as city leaders have pushed for further economic overhauls. The landslide demonstrated that Shenzhen’s success has not freed it from the risks of poorly regulated development.

A commentary on Monday in The Beijing News, a newspaper in the Chinese capital, said the most surprising aspect of the disaster was where it happened.

“In recent years, mudslides, landslides and other disasters do occur, but the incidents are more common in areas prone to geological disasters, or where resources are overexploited and governance is weak,” the commentary said. “It is reasonable to say Shenzhen is not one of those, and at the forefront of the modernization of Chinese cities.”

A company based in Shenzhen that conducts site surveys had previously warned of dangers at the site, Chinese news outlets said. The company, Zongxing Environmental Technology, published an environmental impact assessment report in January warning of soil erosion risks that might cause landslides, “threatening the safety of hills and slopes,” according to the 21st Century Business Herald, a business news publication.

The report, which was published on the company’s website, and a related notice on the website of the government of the Guangming New District, the region of Shenzhen where the disaster occurred, appeared to have been deleted, the newspaper said.

A woman who answered the phone at Zongxing Environmental Technology said that “relevant people are handling the incident” but declined to answer further questions. A spokeswoman for the Guangming New District Management Committee said that she was unable to answer specific questions and that all information would be given through the district’s microblog account and news conferences.

The Shenzhen Special Administrative Region Newspaper said Sunday on its site on the microblog service Weibo that the waste dump had been illegally approved by an official in the Guangming New District government. That report, which was cited by several Chinese news outlets, was later deleted.

More than a year ago, an individual living near the construction waste site complained about the din of honking dump trucks that began at 9 a.m. and continued until 3 or 4 a.m., according to an October 2014 article published by the state-run Shenzhen News. A representative of a local traffic enforcement office said that it would increase supervision of the trucks to limit noise and street-level pollution.
Adam Wu contributed reporting from Shenzhen, China. Kiki Zhao and Vanessa Piao contributed research from Beijing.