By staff reporter Chen Zhongxiaolu

From Caijing Online

At noon on November 17, rescue staff convened in the northwest corner of the giant hole caused when a section of the No. 1 Hangzhou Subway Line collapsed on two days earlier. A body coated in mud was pulled from the debris – the fifth confirmed death.

The victim was Fang Laochuan, 46, from the Qiandao River District of Zhejiang Province. The doctor confirmed that Fang had suffocated to death. As a carpenter, Fang was working underground when the collapse occurred. He and his coworkers comprised most of the victims.

Many carpenters working with Fang were also from the Qiandao River District. Led by Song Dongfeng, they labored in the Xianghu section the subway line. However, Song was not the labor contractor and had to work underground like his employees. Above Song there was a boss named Cao who took care of the hiring for China Railway Sijv Civil Engineering Group, the company contracted to build the collapsed subway line.

Like those carpenters, other workers found their jobs with the Hangzhou subway through multi-level contracting. Wang Mengshu, an academic from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that multi-level contracting was a big problem for subway construction. Many companies farm out their projects once they win a bid in order to increase profits. Safety is often sacrificed in the process.

Once source told Caijing that many of the construction workers on the Hangzhou subway did not have the 10-years of experience that China Railway claimed they did. Instead most of the projects were assigned to labor contractors who subcontracted the work to their relatives, friends, and other affiliates.

In the end, most of the workers had almost no experience in subway construction. There were even some who had no working experience at all. They received no training related to subway construction and were not protected by any safety measures except for a warning that a safety helmet was necessary.

Working conditions also contributed to the tragedy. One survivor recalled the details of construction environment before collapse: “Save for a simple staircase used to access the dig, there was no escape passage.” This staircase broke in two during the collapse, he said, trapping many workers underground until rescue came.

Luckily, there was a crane on hand, which was used to extract 30 workers within minutes of the cave in. However, water from broken pipes eventually flooded the hole to a depth of four meters. Those workers who didn’t make it on the crane likely drown in the mud like Fang.

Another worker from Jiangsu province said that after this collapse he and his friends swore never to work on subways no matter how much money they could make. Several workers from the same village as Fang were still waiting for their payment and the body of one of their other friends. “We left home at the same time and we have to wait for him,” they said.

As these workers moved on, another group of people was rushing toward the scene. They were the family of the deceased and injured workers.

Two more bodies were dug out on November 17. By 6 p.m., the number of victims had increased to seven, with 14 still missing.