According to state media, a school gymnasium in northeast China had a roof collapse when a girls’ volleyball team was using it. Eleven people died as a result.
Although it has not yet been officially confirmed, eyewitness reports to local media indicate that many of the victims are youngsters.
Parents in pain have flocked to a local hospital in search of information.
Only eight of the 19 persons in the gym in Heilongjiang, a manufacturing province, survived.
Local media reports that police have taken the owners of a nearby construction company into custody.
They are alleged to have dumped perlite, a type of volcanic glass, on the gym’s roof while constructing a nearby structure.
Heavy downpours caused the mineral to absorb rainwater, which caused the roof to fall at 15:00 local time (07:00 GMT).
As rescue workers dug into the debris in Qiqihar City, they could hear the coach of the middle school girls’ volleyball team shouting out the names of the pupils, as reported by China National Radio.
Parents have slammed school administrators, alleging improper communication on the rescue operation until Monday morning.
“They tell me my daughter is gone but we never got to see the child. All the children had their faces covered with mud and blood when they were sent to the hospital. I pleaded, please let me identify the child. What if, that wasn’t my child?” one man said in a video that has been widely shared on social media.
“What have [the authorities] been doing four, five, or even six hours after the children were sent to the hospital? … Doctors are not communicating with us about how the rescue is going.
“We have elderly people at home, we need to [help them] be mentally prepared. There are doctors, police officers and other government officials here. But we have not heard anything from you,” he said.
Many users on social media in the country echoed the father’s concerns in the video, questioning the treatment of worried parents by the police and officials at the scene.
“Do people mean nothing to them?” wrote one angry user.
Others questioned why perlite was present on the gym roof in the first place. “The cost for breaking the law is too low in this country, people don’t have any respect for the law, that’s the key reason,” another user wrote.
China frequently experiences construction mishaps attributed to low safety regulations and ineffective enforcement.
At least 31 people were killed in an explosion at a BBQ restaurant in northwest China in June. According to a preliminary inquiry, the blast happened when a restaurant employee was fixing a damaged valve on a tank holding liquefied gas.
29 people were killed in a hospital fire in Beijing in April, and several desperate survivors were forced to evacuate by jumping out of the windows.
