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Taiwan quake: Developer arrested over building collapse

TAIPEI — Prosecutors in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan have issued an arrest warrant for the developer of a building which collapsed during an earthquake on Saturday (Feb 6) killing at least 39 people, a government official said on Tuesday.

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TAINAN (Taiwan) — Police have arrested the builder of a 17-storey apartment complex that collapsed in a predawn earthquake on Saturday here in southwestern Taiwan, the city government announced today (Feb 9), as rescuers deployed heavy machinery in a renewed effort to locate more than 100 people still trapped in the rubble after the 72-hour “golden window” for finding survivors passed.

Mr Lin Minghui, the developer of the Wei-Guan Golden Dragon building, and two of his associates from the Wei-Guan Construction Company, the business that he used to build the apartment complex, were arrested late Monday night, said municipal spokeswoman Ellen Hsueh.

One of Tainan’s two Deputy Secretaries-General, Liu Shih-Chung, said Lin and his associates were arrested on suspicion of criminal business misconduct resulting in fatalities.

The arrest of Lin and his associates is likely to draw considerable attention in mainland China.

Poor construction practices by government contractors were widely blamed for the collapse of many schools and the death of many children during the Sichuan earthquake that killed about 70,000 people and left nearly 18,000 missing in western China in 2008.

When protests over the schools threatened to spread out of control, the Beijing authorities silenced the criticism and limited judicial actions against the contractors.

Firefighters and rescue specialists have pulled 38 bodies from the wreckage of the building in Tainan, while an additional 109 people are missing and believed to still be under the rubble. Only two other people died from the earthquake in this city of 1.8 million.

The arrest of Mr Lin, who had disappeared after the building’s collapse, came hours before local officials decided to deploy house-size excavating machines to drill, tug and tear at the huge mounds of debris on the site.

Rescuers delayed using the equipment for three days after the earthquake, for fear that the machines might cause the wreckage to subside further, collapsing the tiny cavities in which more than 100 people are feared trapped.

“It’s approaching the 73rd hour and relatives are getting more anxious as time passes by and expect more. They hope the rescue team can make further moves,” said Tainan Mayor William Lai at the scene today, after he ordered rescuers to start using diggers and extractors to remove giant concrete slabs to better detect signs of life.

The reason for the delay in using heavy equipment was clear this afternoon. As the machinery worked, concrete slabs elsewhere in the wreckage sometimes shook, releasing cascades of pebbles and puffs of dust, but not actually tumbling down the sides of the debris field.

In the first days after the earthquake, firefighters and other rescue workers were so careful about disturbing the wreckage that they removed sand and other debris a bucket at a time, passing them along human chains. But progress has been slow. The layers of the collapsed high-rise were so compressed, from hitting the ground at considerable speed, that even power tools could not penetrate the mazes of crushed concrete and steel reinforcing bars.

The use of heavy machinery “is still to try to save people, because the rescuers cannot find a way down into the complex”, said Ms Hsueh.

The rescue workers paused frequently and used sophisticated sensors in an attempt to find signs of life; if any were detected, they planned to suspend the use of heavy equipment in that spot and proceed slowly and cautiously, with lighter tools.

Although the sensors indicated on Sunday that more than 100 people might still be alive, rescuers were no longer detecting persuasive signals, said Ms Hsueh. THE NEW YORK TIMES

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