After three large bridges collapse in a single month, Chinese web users say “I told you so.”
(Ecns.cn)-- A complete section of the Wuyi mountain bridge in East China's Fujian Province collapsed on July 15, killing a bus driver and injuring 22 bus passengers. The following day, gaps appeared in the middle section of the No. 3 Qianjiang River Bridge in Hangzhou, capital city of East China's Zhejiang Province, injuring a truck driver.
Earlier this month, a bridge in Binhai County of East China's Jiangsu Province partially collapsed, causing two trucks to fall into a river below the bridge.
All three bridges were built in the mid-to-late 1990s. The Qianjiang Bridge in Hangzhou was refurbished in 2005, but minutes from a meeting of the local transportation bureau showed that an incorrect ratio of sand to concrete was used in the maintenance, according to a report in China Daily.
Among the three accidents, the cave-in at the No. 3 Qianjiang River Bridge, despite not being fatal, is now drowning in a sea of criticism from citizens and web users who claim they knew the bridge was going to fall down years ago.
"I told you so"
The cave-in took place around 2 a.m., leaving a 20-meter long, 1-meter wide pit in the right lane of the No.3 Qiantang River Bridge, said a traffic police officer at the scene.
A passing heavy truck loaded with steel plates toppled off the bridge but its driver jumped out before it crashed to the ground.
The injured driver was sent to a nearby hospital. Police said his condition was not critical.
The cave-in site is only a few hundred meters from the Qiantang River, a major waterway in east China.
Investigators said the truck was overloaded after more than 100 tons of steel plates were collected from the scene, though the wrecked vehicle weighed only 32 tons.
The news turned out to be unsurprising for some web users, who predicted the cave-in several years ago.
No psychic powers are needed. As early as 2007, posts on popular Internet forum Tianya.cn pointed out that the ratio of sand to concrete used to build the bridge was incorrect, according to the Beijing News. Other posts to the forum pointed out that the bridge was built by the same company responsible for a collapsed bridge in Hunan province, and advised drivers to avoid it.
Low quality infrastructure may be caused by corruption amongst officials responsible for overseeing construction projects. Zhao Zhanqi, an official responsible for the Qianjiang bridge project, was sentence to life in jail in 2007 for taking over 6 million yuan in bribes during the bidding for the bridge project and during its construction.
