China landslide toll reaches 2; police detain one

The death toll in the massive landslide in southern China on Wednesday reached two even as rescuers pulled out a worker alive who miraculously survived on rain water after being trapped for over 60 hours, bringing fresh hope among the relatives of 74 missing people.

As the 3,000 personnel continued the rescue operations carefully digging through the massive pile of mud stretching to over 10 football fields at the industrial estate, Chinese police raided the premises of the company of a dumpsite blamed for the disaster and detained one of its official for questioning.

Tian Zeming, 21, a native of the southwestern municipality of Chongqing, was pulled from the debris around 6:30 AM local time and rushed to hospital. He managed to survive as he was stuck in a small space in an office building inundated by the mud. He found there was adequate air and survived with rain water, state-run CCTV news channel reported.

Tian told rescuers his name and said there was another survivor beside him. The second person, however, was found dead by the time rescuers located him. One body was pulled out of the mud on Tuesday. Tian's rescue sparked hopes among the relatives of 74 others who are listed missing in the landslide that crushed 33 buildings in the industrial estate where mud as high as a five story building was accumulated, the report said.

Following surgery, Tian is conscious and stable, hospital President Wang Guangming said, adding that he is extremely weak, dehydrated and has sustained several soft tissue injuries and multiple fractures. The fallen debris seriously crushed Tian's right lower leg but the hospital is doing as much as it can to save his lower limb, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Wang as saying.

Heavy machinery continues to rake through the thousands of tonnes of soil and rubble that has swollen up factories and residential buildings even though the 72-hour golden period for saving lives has ended. Authorities published the names of 73 missing people yesterday while three others remained unidentified.

Local residents who narrowly escaped the disaster still cannot believe their loved ones had not been able to make it.

"I have had nightmares about my wife crying to me for help in the past two days. My wife was cooking lunch when the landslide hit. I felt something wrong when the power was cut off and went out to check. I saw the earth coming down," a migrant worker told the Global Times.

He asked his wife to run out of the building while spontaneously trying to escape but she did not respond. He managed to escape only with two of his fellow workers. He believes his wife was still alive and repeatedly insisted he could show the rescuers her location. 

Meanwhile, police reportedly stormed the office of the Shenzhen Yixianglong Investment Development, the company handling the Shenzhen dumpsite and confiscated a computer and documents, and taken away its deputy head Yu Shengli.

Geological specialists of the Ministry of Land Resources have concluded that the disaster was caused by the collapse of the man-made construction waste and not by the landslide from the hill itself, Global Times reported. However, there is no explanation as how so much mud has engulfed the area. The hills around the area were subjected to heavy quarrying. The dumpsite involved suspicious business deals and possible breach of regulations, the report said.

Official media reported that a quarry at the estate was approved in February last year by the local government as a temporary storage site for construction waste. The contract permitted the use of the site till February 21 but the site was apparently still being used for at least 10 months after the permitted period.

Ten months of operations means hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of waste was dumped at the site, forming a huge mountain of soil, Xinhua quoted an official as saying.