NEARLY half of the deaths from last week’s earthquake in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province have been attributed to building collapses triggered by the use of hollow bricks and construction materials of inferior quality, domestic media reported yesterday.

    The 5.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Yingjiang County on March 10 left 25 people dead and 314 others injured, according to official figures.

    Three students and eight others were killed in building collapses triggered by the use of poor construction materials, the Global Times newspaper said, quoting a report in the Caijing magazine.

    Two high school students, Qu Yonghuan and Li Jingrong, were killed when a school built with hollow bricks collapsed. Another death, that of 50-year-old Liu Yuhua, was also attributed to the collapse of a roof built with bricks of poor quality, according to the report.

    Yin Anqiang, director of Yingjiang’s housing and urban-rural development bureau, said hollow brick buildings were common in Yingjiang because they were cheap to build, but he also warned that they were the most dangerous buildings to be in during a quake.

    But Yin said “hollow bricks are no longer allowed to be either produced or used as housing construction materials,” according to the report.

    The newspaper quoted Tian Shiyu of China Engineering Consultants, an industry association, as saying that hollow brick constructions collapse the most easily.

    Earthquakes strike Yingjiang frequently. Between 1991 and 2008, eight earthquakes of magnitudes above five hit the county, about 700 kilometers west of the provincial capital, Kunming.

    After a quake in August 2008, the Central Government allocated funding for the construction of strong, earthquake-resistant buildings.

    But the March 10 earthquake has people asking why most of the buildings in the quake-prone area were still made of hollow bricks, despite financial aid to improve the quality of the county’s buildings. About 4,000 houses were destroyed and nearly 10,000 badly damaged.

    The majority of local homes torn apart during the March 10 earthquake were built before 2008 with hollow bricks, said Zuo Qiangguo, a county government spokesman.

    “It’s cheaper to use hollow bricks than ordinary ones in construction,” Zuo said.

    (SD News)