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China plant accident toll rises to 67

A building platform at a Chinese power plant's cooling tower has collapsed, with the death toll rising to 67.

China plant
Image from @XHNews Source: Twitter

The death toll from the collapse of scaffolding at a building site in eastern China has jumped to 67, with two other workers injured and one more missing.

China's state broadcaster CCTV says more than 100 paramilitary police have joined efforts to rescue workers who were trapped when a work platform at a power plant construction site came tumbling down on Thursday morning.

The plant's cooling tower was being built in the city of Fengcheng in Jiangxi province.

The latest reported death toll suggests nearly all the construction workers at the cooling tower perished.

Local media reports say close to 70 people were working at the site when the scaffolding collapsed.

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Footage showed iron pipes, steel bars and wooden planks strewn across the floor of the cooling tower.

China has suffered a series of major industrial accidents over recent months blamed on corruption, disregard for safety and pressure to boost production amid a slowing economy.

The head of a logistics company was recently handed a suspended death sentence over a massive explosion at an illegal chemical warehouse in the northern port of Tianjin in 2015 that killed 173 people, most of them firefighters and police officers.

In June 2015, poor decisions by the captain and crew were blamed for the deaths of 442 people after a modified cruise ship capsized on the Yangtze River.

Eighty-one people were killed in December when a man-made mountain of soil and waste collapsed on nearly three-dozen buildings in the southern manufacturing centre of Shenzhen.


2 min read

Published

Updated

Source: AAP



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