Man buried alive in subway construction site collapse

A worker died after being buried in a sudden collapse at a Subway Line 10 construction site Monday afternoon in Haidian district.

The male worker, 42, was already dead when the rescue team found him at 8 am this morning, 16 hours after the collapse, Li Jianren, media officer with Beijing Emergency Medical Center told the Global Times yesterday.

He was working 15 meters underground in a shaft, and the sudden collapse buried the man, Li said.

The construction site, at Zhanghua Nanlu, was blocked and residents were kept away when police, firefighters and medical staff arrived for the rescue Monday evening. The construction is part of the Line 10 Phase II extension.

"It was chaos when we got there after the accident, and it took a long time to find who was in charge of the site," said Gao Feng, a media officer with the fire department of the municipal public security bureau, who also went for the rescue.

They received the accident report at 4:40 pm on Monday, and the rescue was difficult, Gao said. The area where the collapse occurred was about one square meter, he said, but he did not explain the reason for the collapse.

"We had to be extremely careful to make sure the digging didn't cause a second collapse, and the underground machinery wouldn't hurt the victim and our team members," Gao told the Global Times, "that's why the rescue took such a long time."

Yan Zhihe, a publicity employee with the Beijing Rail Transit Construction and Management Company which oversees subway construction, told the Global Times the collapse has nothing to do with their company, although it occurred within the subway construction site.

"He was working on a different heating pipeline project in the shaft, not on our subway project," he said, explaining the worker killed was not one of their employees.

The worker was from Henan Province and his family is on the way to Beijing, the Legal Mirror reported.