CHINA:AN OFFICIAL investigator has said Juyuan Middle School, which collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake killing hundreds of students, was badly weakened by poor design and materials.
The finding backs up what hundreds of parents have been saying since the May 12th earthquake - that many of the hundreds of schools that collapsed in the quake, comprising some 7,000 classrooms all told, were shoddily constructed.
Penny-pinching or corrupt bureaucrats were responsible for the poor construction of the buildings, according to local people at Juyuan school, and at other schools around the region. Angry parents are calling this building work "tofu construction".
The death toll from the earthquake is more than 68,500 and expected to rise, with 20,000 people missing. Among the dead in the 7.9 magnitude quake were at least 9,000 students and teachers whose schools fell or were buried under landslides.
The Juyuan Middle School collapsed quickly, and locals said that 500 died in the rubble. The quake happened in the early afternoon, when most children would have been at school.
After lunch, children in Chinese schools take a nap, so many were sleeping at the time, while others were doing afternoon schoolwork. The mud around the school was littered with notebooks and copybooks.
Parents were furious that their children were crushed in the shoddy school buildings, while nearby apartments and government offices stayed upright.
"There were certainly problems with site selection, the building's structure and structural features, the construction and materials," said Chen Baosheng, an expert from Shanghai's Tongji University, who was part of an investigation team under the ministry of construction.
Steel reinforcement rods in the building's concrete were too thin, and pillar supports were not properly attached, MR Chen told the Southern Weekend newspaper.
"It was to be expected that a building like this collapsed in an earthquake and it would have been strange only if it didn't," he added.
There were similar complaints from parents of the scores of children who died in the Fuxing No 2 Primary School in Mianzhu, and in dozens of other schools.
Parents in some schools are demanding compensation and criminal investigations into the way schools were built. Some have taken on lawyers and are considering petitioning Beijing.
"So many children have died, and our responsible departments and our designers, architects and structural engineers should all reflect on this," said Mr Chen.
Earlier this week, a Sichuan education official withdrew from the Beijing Olympic torch rally in atonement for the poor construction that caused so many schools to collapse.